The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-07-05

NWAsHINGToN, D. c. July s.rav s,w
 WY (speeial)-Milllons :, 'ono,spa aa,,' na ra. lively few know the origin of the nanle' It's history and it's symbolism are oe- soribed in a communication to the Na- tional Geographic Society by John n. Finley as follows:
 tAmerica'-a name that was first hearo CT the planet, or at any rate flrst put oh |. nrinted page. according to the best au- ,bor;ties in the village of St. Die, amohs the Vosges mountains, in the east ol France. often called the baptismai ion' of America.
 .On a pilgrimage to this valley or the vosees some years ago, found stiii standing the cloisters where the schoiars had lived who wrote The lntroduc.loii .o Ptolemy's Cosmography. the DOCK III which it was suggested that the name America be given to the newly oiSoo'- cred fourth continent, and who prepared tb. now famous map on which the emerging continent was identified Inere' too. I found the site of the old printing shop. and the house itself in when 'he printer. Jean Basin. had lived
 ..At the beginning of the war the 1er- mans had occupied it, and, in 1917, tneir opns looked down upon it from the 'piue line of the Vosges The cloisters, close under the mountains, I found in recent and second pilgrimage had not been oaii- aged, but there were many houses 'na' had been destroyed by shell or wantoi' fire though Jean Bas.ns was Sriii stand ing. "But the printer. who few years ago reproduced in fac-simile the famous DOOR, had had both legs shot off while crossihs inc bridge one day between the two parts of the village. .Alas.' he said. when he learned that he must die, alas! shael rot be the first to carry flowers to Strass- burg for he had dreamed of the day when Strassburg, where rests one of the original copies of this famous book. again would be within French borders. "It is a significant fact that while this name America was suggested in geo. graphical treatise in which the earth was considered the center of the universe there was at the moment of the first printing of the name a Polish scholar Kopernik (Copernicus). who was develop ing new system of astronomy, new cosmography, whose substitution Tor 'ne Ptolemaic, geocentric, anthropoceh'rio creed of the universe was to be the cap ital event of modern thought
 And so it was that while 'America was haptized into the Ptolemaic cosmos' it, inhabitants. after the aborigines, dwelt from inc first in Copernican universe, wanderers in an infinity of space with a shuddering sense of physical immensity. .ro he sure. there was no visible change. But change in mans conscious re,ationship to the physical universe came. na if is inconceivable that it did not af- feet in its coming his whole life upon the earth.
 .Europe could not readily forget the geography of it's infancy and childhood, tut America began from it's God-fearing settlement with an astronomy of infinite distances. with cosmography in which it was itself but infinitesimal. with geog- raphy partakng of the sky as well as of the sea and land.
 'As there was no feudal system of so- ciety for America to unlearn. beginning as it did with the compact and con sitution. so there was no physical theory os the universe for it to abandon. It