A FRENCH ICONOCLAST.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 11377, 13 September 1902, Page 6

A FRENCH ICONOCLAST.

v' '• Sm The lustre of many a great, Wise has been dimmfrd of .xectnt.ywtn, ifM cold light of "critical research."! rS Christopher Columbus is the latest to suflft? in the process. For centuries tl- world believed that Columbus set out on faj, mehtous voyage with tb* fiudi-_ft&tj9 India could be reached by sailing Westw_# But a French writer named He*_y .W2_l in a work just published, seta _u_Jej£j| prove that the great navigator's t_*W*gl formed after, and not before, his-firavSl age -cress the Atlantic. And he Wtsdl to "establish" the story that Columbai' M rived his project of a voyage into the wJj from an anonymous pilot who had alrejQ crossed the unknown seas and new land. ''Everything tends to are told, "that what has been described!! " the vocation of Columbus dates only fg£j "the confidence made to him by thep_M

"who by accident had discovered, ?lil "thought he had discovered, " islands or lands, and who had c<mviß« " Columbus of the reality of his Hitherto, it has always been believed Uglf Toscaaelli, a Florentine mathetnatician; &§! spired Columbus witb the idea of rea<&|p Asia by a western route, but M. asserts that the letter by Toscanelli gave rise to this belief was forged j_-gl after the discovery of the New World..'*J||| stern critio goes on to say that "had never overrun the seas, as ha " to haye done, nor sailed for forty " he wrote in 1501 to the Catholic K_is| M. Vignaud'a "critical study," in fact, havoc with many of the accepted the famous voyager's career, and leay**'Jl? doubtful whether Columbus Bhould _oto regarded as no less a fraud than the ti&M tunate Shakespeare is in the eyes $m} " Baconites" of to-day. . -"jjj«j^