Note 124 — Chapter III · 1474-1492.
Reading edition
“Paolo Toscanelli was so greatly distinguished as an astronomer that Behaim’s teacher, Regiomontanus, dedicated to him, in 1463, his work, De Quadratura Circuli, directed against the Cardinal Nicolaus de Cusa. He constructed the great gnomon in the church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, and died in 1482, at the age of eighty-five, without having lived long enough to enjoy the pleasure of learning the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope by Diaz, and of the tropical part of the new continent by Columbus.”—Humboldt: Cosmos. Otté’s trans. vol. ii. p. 644. Note.