Terrestrial and Celestial Globes: Their History and Construction Including a Consideration of their Value as Aids in the Study of Geography and Astronomy (Volume I of II)

HITHERTO there has not appeared in English a detailed historical treatise on globes terrestrial and celestial. The publications are somewhat numerous, it is true, in which a very general consideration has been given to the uses of globes, including a reference to their important structural features, and to the problems geographical and astronomical in the solution of which they may be counted of service. There are a few studies, critical and historical, touching certain selected examples of the early globe maker’s handiwork which can be cited. Attention, for example, may here be directed to Sir Clements Markham’s valuable introduction to his excellent English translation of Hues’ ‘Tractatus de Globis,’ a work originally prepared for the purpose of furnishing a description of the Molyneaux globes, in which introduction he undertook “to pass in review the celestial and terrestrial globes which preceded or were contemporaneous with the first that were made in England (1592) so far as a knowledge of them has come down to us,” yet the learned author cites but a fraction of the many globes referred to in the following pages. In Ravenstein’s ‘Behaim, His Life and His Globe,’ we have perhaps the most scholarly treatment of its kind in any language, but the study is limited to the work of one man, the maker of the oldest extant terrestrial globe, which is dated 1492.