Marmor Sculptile

Abstract

Marmor Sculptile was introduced by William Croswell, a Boston cartographer and educator, on his 1810 Mercator map of the starry heavens. Croswell was described somewhat charitably by his biographer, Robert W. Lovett, as an “eccentric scholar” who “tried hard to make a name for himself in American science and letters.” While Croswell intended his map to show only the “ancient constellations … with those of the southern hemisphere, formed prior to the eighteenth century,” he allowed “some smaller stars and modern constellations … where the deficiency would have been remarkable.” These “modern constellations” included two of his own, Marmor Sculptile and Sciurus Volans (the Flying Squirrel; Chap. 15). But while Croswell attempted some utilitarian justification for introducing the latter, the Bust of Columbus merely “fills the place of the Net, which is also modern.” In short, Croswell argues in the introductory material to his map that because Nicolas Louis de Lacaille’s inventions were similarly “modern,” he could replace a Lacaille constellation as justifiably as Lacaille created it in the first place.