Regionum Circum Polarium Lapponiæ Islandiæ Et Groenlandiæ Novae Et Veteris Nova Descriptio Geographica.

This north polar projection map is a busy, decorative map, showing the North Pole, North America and the northwest of Europe and Asia, including Greenland, Lapland, the British Isles, Iceland, Nova Zemblya, Hudson Bay, New England, Northern Canada, Europe, and Russia, etc., full of scenes of hunting, whaling, worshipping, and a Lapland market.
With a mythical Friesland and inaccurately placed Frobisher "strait" contrast with a much better defined eastern North America. However, there is not much development here of the Canadian Arctic, for there had been no major expeditions in the area since the 1630s.
In Asia, though, all Siberian rivers had been discovered and navigated, and the most eastern part of the Asian continent had already been rounded by the Russian Cossack Semen Dezhnev in 1648.
The title cartouche is engraved onto the hide of a polar bear and held up by two hunters. At the lower right-hand corner, a skilfully engraved scene showing "Lappen Marckti," where merchants are trading tools and weapons to Laplanders. At the upper left corner a scene of bear hunting on sledges drawn by reindeer.
Last but not least - as in many maps by Scherer; God can't be missing. Here he's represented up of the small cartouche on centre-top as a triangle in a circle, below we can see two natives worshipping the Sun, under the motto "SOLEM ADORANT A DEUM, QUI FECIT SOLEM IGNORAVIT" [Adoring the Sun as God, in Ignorance that it was God who made the Sun]

From: Scherer's "Atlas Novus". Heinrich Scherer (1628-1704) was a Professor of Hebrew, Mathematics and Ethics at the University of Dillingen until about 1680. Thereafter he obtained important positions as Official Tutor to the Royal Princes of Mantua and Bavaria. It was during his time in Munich as Tutor to the Princely house of Bavaria that his lifetime's work as a cartographer received acclaim and recognition.
Scherer's "Atlas Novus", first published in Munich between 1702 and 1710 and reissued in a second edition between 1730 and 1737 was a revolutionary work in terms of the development of European mapmaking at the beginning of the 18th century.
The Atlas comprised 7 separate volumes entitled 'Geographia Naturalis', 'Geographia Hierarchica', 'Geographia Politica', 'Tabellae Geographicae', 'Atlas Marianus', 'Critica Quadrapartita', and 'Geographia Artificialis'. The 180 maps included in this work were prepared between 1699 and 1700 and were engraved by Leonard Hecknaeur, Joseph Montelegre or Matthaus Wolfgang with each volume introduced by fine allegorical frontispieces by the same engravers.

What makes Scherer's maps unusual is their highly decorative Catholic iconography and imagery and the revolutionary thematic nature of many of the maps. Scherer himself was a Jesuit and many of the maps draw heavily from the history and development of the Jesuit order since its establishment by St.Ignatius Loyala in the early 16th Century when it was the driving force behind the European Catholic Counter Reformation.
Scherer's maps vividly chart the revival and spread of the Catholic faith in the late 16th and 17th centuries principally through the efforts of Jesuit missionaries around the globe and most notably in North and South America, South East Asia and the Far East.
Scherer fills his maps with the images of vibrant religiosity, of a vital Catholic Faith of contemporary Jesuit Saints and merciful Madonnas, a World divided between Darkness and Light, between the Protestant-Heathen & the True Believer, between the Chosen Sheep and the Rejected Goats.
This is not surprising given Scherer's Jesuit roots and the publication of his work in the deeply conservative Catholic Bavarian stronghold of Munich. In this imagery, Scherer took some of the first steps towards the development of what may be called thematic cartography.

On many of his maps he divides the world between areas of shaded darkness and unshaded light, the latter representing the light of the Catholic faith around the globe, albeit sometimes being shown in terms of hope rather than reality. This is certainly true for example in China, an area which Scherer invariably shows as unshaded in spite of the stumbling progress and limited successes of the small Jesuit Mission established in China by Matteo Ricci in the late 16th century.
Scherer takes thematic cartography one step further in the Geographia Politica and Geographia Naturalis. He produces maps that remove political boundaries, borders and place names, replacing them with the revolutionary concept for the period of showing the Mountains and forests in physical relief with all of the major waterways and rivers systems clearly depicted.
Scherer's atlas forms an important milestone in the development of scientific and thematic cartography, providing a remarkable and revolutionary alternative vision of the World in showing only its major physical and topographical features.