Editorial note — Translated from Revue des Questions Historiques. Americus Vespucius and Christopher Columbus. The True Origin of the Name of America.

[Footnote 198: The fact that these discoveries of Americus had taken place in southern regions added to their interest. Many persons still persisted in the error of ancient cosmography, that the two temperate zones, north and south of the equator, were alone habitable, and could never hold communication with each other because of the burning atmosphere of the torrid zone. We find a ludicrous and remarkable specimen of this blind spirit of conservatism in a certain Zachariah Sillus, who writes at Paris in 1515, that is to say, twenty-three years after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and seventeen years after Vasco de Gama's expedition to the Indies: "Between the torrid zone and the glacial zones, two zones only are habitable. By whom is the one corresponding to our own inhabited? Macrobius affirms it; no one has ever known, no one ever will know. For the torrid zone placed between them interdicts all intercourse between the men of these two regions. The superior zone, then, only is inhabited, I mean the one lying between the northern and equatorial regions." (Bibliothèque Magazine, No. 16169.) Others understood no better the antipodes, the men of the opposite hemisphere standing head downward. The voyages of Vespucius contributed largely toward the solution of these problems.]