. Michigan historical collections . east and we&t than it was wide north and south. With this ideain mind he placed the first meridian^ or the westernmost point fromwhich to reckon distance eastward, in the Fortunatse or Canary the new period of map making began the Spaniards adopted thesame point, and in 1634 a Congress of European Mathematicians con-firmed it at the west edge of Ferro, the most westerly of the Canaries,and all the earh^ French maps of this country reckon the longitudefrom FeiTO as the first or principal meridian. They compute it east-ward around the entire circl
. Michigan historical collections . east and we&t than it was wide north and south. With this ideain mind he placed the first meridian^ or the westernmost point fromwhich to reckon distance eastward, in the Fortunatse or Canary the new period of map making began the Spaniards adopted thesame point, and in 1634 a Congress of European Mathematicians con-firmed it at the west edge of Ferro, the most westerly of the Canaries,and all the earh^ French maps of this country reckon the longitudefrom FeiTO as the first or principal meridian. They compute it east-ward around the entire circle, so that from that starting point and bythat method Detroit would be in about 300 degrees. As English explorers became active they naturally took London astheir first meridian, and America, when it became a nation, began tocalculate from the meridian of Washington, but finally at the GeodeticCongress, held at Washington in 1884, it was resolved to adopt themeridian of Greenwich as the universal first meridian, the representa-. EARLY MAPS OF MICHIGAN 629 tives of France being the only important objectors. In examining theolder maps these changes of the starting point must be kept in mind. Latitude was always reckoned from the same point and measuredby the declination of the sun, but early instruments were crude, andit is rare to find in the old maps any point correctly placed either inlongitude or latitude. Jedediah Morse, the father of American Geography, and inciden-tally the father of Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegraph inventor, pub-lished in 1796 the third edition of his American Universal Geography,the first edition of which was published in 1789. One of the reasonsfor this publication, as he tells us in the preface to the second edition,was that To depend on foreigners partial, to a proverb, to their owncountry for an account of the divisions, rivers, productions, manufac-tures, navigation, commerce, literature, improvements, etc., of the Ameri-can States, would certainly
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