early maps alluded to are printed in Philip's Students' Atlas of
Modern History, which also contains a long series of maps
illustrating the extra-Europeans activities of the European
states.] which incorporate this knowledge, are less wildly
imaginative than their predecessors, and show a vague notion of
the general configuration of the main land-masses in the Old
World. But beyond the fringes of the Mediterranean the world was
still in the main unknown to, and unaffected by, European
civilisation down to the middle of the fifteenth century.

Then, suddenly, came the great era of explorations, which were
made possible by the improvements in navigation worked out during
the fifteenth century, and which in two generations incredibly
transformed the aspect of the world. The marvellous character of
this revelation can perhaps be illustrated by the comparison of
two maps, that of Behaim, published in 1492, and that of Schoener,
published in 1523. Apart from its adoption of the theory that the
earth was globular, not round and flat, Behaim's map shows little
advance upon Fra Mauro, except that it gives a clearer idea of the
shape of Africa, due to the earlier explorations of the
Portuguese. But Schoener's map shows that the broad outlines of
the distribution of the land-masses of both hemispheres were
already in 1523 pretty clearly understood. This astonishing
advance was due to the daring and enterprise of the Portuguese
explorers, Diaz, Da Gama, Cabral, and of the adventurers in the
service of Spain, Columbus, Balboa, Vespucci, and--greatest of
them all--Magellan.

These astonishing discoveries placed for a time the destinies of
the outer world in the hands of Spain and Portugal, and the first