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Monsters

Introduction

Until the nineteenth century when railroads of steamships of transcontinental put many people to reach them travel to abroad, only a few fearless adventurers, especially sailors and traders, was traveling to distant sites. The stranger was not really familiar with places. Therefore, the first cartographers did not fear that they could accuse them of inaccuracy and gave harness to the imagination in compiling maps. The above illustrated is more evident in old maps with mythical animals and strange forms of human. For example in 1493 the German cartographer Hartmann Schedel pointed out some different creatures such as men armed with horns, birdmen and bald women, with beard.

Discussion

Ancient Sources an important reference work for cartographers of the Renaissance was the Geography of Ptolemy (second century), which included the 8,000 locations and instructions for preparing maps. For example, the German cartographer Sebastian Munster, born in 1489, rounded to the Ptolemy described capricious beings that Pliny the Elder, Roman writer of the first century. In the vicinity of India drew individuals with one foot, but it was large enough to serve as an umbrella if it rose above the head. Elsewhere, a race of men had the head of a dog and bark instead of talk (Barker, 2002).

Some illustrations of old maps were so great that it is doubtful that anyone would believe. Did the Chinese year 350 of our era had the belief, as it shows a map of the time, they shared the world with people who had holes in the stomach, to carry from one place to another using sticks inserted into the dog body and supported by brackets to the shoulder height? And European cartographers of the seventeenth century, do we verily thought that the Pacific Ocean had mermaids frolicking in the waves of the sea? Munster dispelled the doubts of his readers with the comment God is wonderful in his work. But other notions and fancies were not entirely the work of the imagination. In many maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth see a strange animal with horns, sometimes one and two, known today as rhinoceros. Among the early naturalists had discussions in which some claimed and others denied that a horn was actually a unicorn, debate was resolved in the late eighteenth century, when it was discovered that there are two species of rhino horns and the other one. This type of mistake was common in ...