The map of Hieronimo de Verrazano, recently brought to particular notice, [Footnote:  Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York. 1873 Vol.  Iv.  Notes on the Verrazano map.  By James Carson Brevoort.] is a planisphere on a roll of parchment eight feet and a half long and of corresponding width, formerly belonging to Cardinal Stefano Borgia, in whose museum, in the college of the Propaganda in the Vatican, it is now preserved.  It has no date, though, from a legend upon it referring to the Verrazzano discovery, it may be inferred that the year 1529 is intended to be understood as the time when it was constructed.  No paleographical description of it, however, has yet been published, from which the period of its construction might be determined, or the congruity of its parts verified.  It may, however, in order to disencumber the question, be admitted to be the map mentioned by Annibal Caro in 1537, in a letter to which occasion will hereafter be had to refer, and that its author was the brother of the navigator, though of both these facts satisfactory proof is wanting. [Footnote:  This map was either unknown to Ramusio and Gastaldi or discredited by them.  Ramusio in his preface, after mentioning to Fracastor that he placed the relation of Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier in that volume, adds, that inasmuch as Fracastor has exhorted him to make, in imitation of Ptolemy, four or five maps of as much as was known up to that time of the part of the world recently discovered, he could not disobey his commands, and had therefore arranged to have them made by the Piedmontese cosmographer Giacomo de Gastaldi.  They are accordingly to be found in the same volume with the letter of Verrazzano.  One of them is a map of New France extending somewhat south of Norumbega, but no features of the Verrazzano map are to be traced upon it:  and no other map of the country is given.  Fol. 424-5.]

No entirely legible copy of this map has yet been made public.  Two photographs, both much reduced from the original, have been made for the American Geographical Society, from the larger of which, so much as relates to the present purpose, has been carefully reproduced here on the same scale.  It is to be regretted that the names along the coast, and the legends relating to the Verrazzano exploration, are not photographed distinctly, though the legends and a few names have been supplied by means of a pen.  But although a knowledge of all the names is necessary for a thorough understanding of this map, these photographs, nevertheless, affording a true transcript of it in other respects, enable us to determine that it is of no authority as to the alleged discovery itself. [Footnote:  This map was first brought to public notice by M. Thomassey, in a memoir entitled, Les Papes Geographes et la Cosmographie du Vatican, which was published in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages.  Nouvelle serie, tome xxxv.  Annee 1853.  Tome Troisieme.  Paris.  We are indebted to this memoir for the explanation of our copy of the map of the scale of distances, which is illegible on the photographs.  According to this explanation there should be nine points in the narrower, and nineteen in the wider spaces.  These being two and half leagues apart, give twenty-five leagues for the smaller and fifty leagues for the larger spaces, making three hundred and fifty leagues for the whole scale.]