[3] From the Hakluyt Society's Select Letters of Columbus.
[4] From the Hakluyt Society's edition of Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama.
[5] From the Hakluyt Society's edition of Albuquerque's Commentaries.
[6] [Missing] (Please see the [Transcriber's Note].)
[7] Compare Archer and Kingsford, The Crusades, in the Stories of the Nations.
[8] Rejecting the old idea of an encircling ocean as the girdle or limit of the known world, and replacing it with a new fancy of unbounded continent (on all sides except the north-west)—a fancy which the vast extension of Roman Dominion under the Empire may have fostered.
[9] In using the expressions "Chart," or "Map" of Strabo's description (c. a.d. 20), it is not meant to imply that Strabo himself left more than a written description from which a plan was afterwards prepared: "The world according to Strabo." The same applies to Eratosthenes (c. b.c. 200) and all pre-Ptolemaic Greek geographers. Ptolemy's Atlas, probably, and the Peutinger Table, more certainly, are maps really drawn by ancient designers; but these are the only ones that have survived from a much larger number.
[10] In which the habitable quarter of the world, situated mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, was just about twice as long as it was broad.
[11] In Columbus' letters to Queen Isabella in 1498, we catch, as it were, the last echo of the Arabic mélange of Moses and Greek geography, along with the results of Roger Bacon's corrections of Ptolemy. "The Old Hemisphere," he writes "which has for its centre the isle of Arim, is spherical, but the other (new) Hemisphere has the form of the lower half of a pear. Just one hundred leagues west of the Azores the earth rises at the Equator and the temperature grows keener. The summit is over against the mouth of the Orinoco."
[12] "The Obliquity of the Ecliptic, the Eccentricity of the Sun, the Precession of the Equinoxes."