Books of Cosmography. Folio 12.

Chapter Five: On the Parallel Circles.

Parallels (which are also called segments) are circles having an equal distance from each other in every part; and even if they could be extended to infinity, they would never meet original: "concurrentes," describing the geometric property where lines do not intersect.. Although parallels can be drawn at will, nevertheless (following the example of Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy, the influential 2nd-century AD geographer and astronomer.), we have distributed them by certain degrees of latitude in both the solid Referring to a three-dimensional globe. and the flat representation of the earth. This is also shown in the following arithmetic or tabular figure. They are separated from each other by this interval: the longest day of one parallel exceeds the longest day of the next parallel by almost a quarter part of an hour. The distance of the remaining parallels is to be imagined in the same relationship, both in the Northern and the Southern parts.

A woodcut diagram of a celestial or terrestrial sphere contained within an ornate rectangular border decorated with foliate scrolls. The border is labeled at the cardinal points: "South" original: "Meridies" at the top, "North" original: "Septentrio" at the bottom, "East" original: "Oriens" on the left, and "West" original: "Occidens" on the right. Inside the circle, horizontal parallel lines are drawn. The top half is labeled "Southern Parallels" original: "Paralleli Meridionales" and the bottom half "Northern Parallels" original: "Paralleli Septentrionales". Each half contains a set of 21 lines, which are numbered sequentially along a curved diagonal from 1 to 21. A central horizontal line is labeled "Equinoctial" original: "Aequinoctialis," referring to the Equator..