20) gives a list of
editions, the first English translation appearing in 1693.
It is possible that the author owed the idea of his work to
Neville's pamphlet.

In most of the older surveys of the known world America counts as the
fourth part, naturally coming after Europe, Asia, and Africa. Even that
arrangement was not generally accepted. Joannes Leo (Hasan Ibn Muhammad,
al-Wazzan), writing in 1556, properly called Africa "la tierce Partie du
Monde;" but the Seigneur de la Popelliniere, in his "Les Trois Mondes,"
published in 1582, divided the globe into three parts--1. Europe, Asia,
and Africa; 2. America, and 3. Australia. A half century later,
Pierre d'Avitz, of Toumon (Ardeche), entitled one of his compositions
"Description Generale de l'Amerique troisiesme partie du Monde," first
published in 1637.{2} The expedition under Alvaro de Mendana de Nevra,
setting sail from Callao, November 19, 1567, and steering westward,
sought to clear doubt concerning a continent which report had pictured
as being somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The Solomon Islands rewarded
the enterprise, and with New Guinea and the Philippines completed
a connection between Peru and the continent of Asia. There had long
existed, however, a settled belief in the existence of a great continent
in the southern hemisphere, which should serve as a counterpoise to the
known lands in the northern.

1 A copy is in the Boston Athenaeum.

The geographical ideas of the times required such a continent, [44]and
even before the circumnavigation of Africa, the world-maps indicated
to the southward "terra incognita secundum Ptolemeum,"{1} or a land of
extreme temperature and wholly unknown.{2} The sailing of ships round
the Cape of Good Hope dissipated in some degree this belief but it
merely placed some distance between that cape and the supposed Terra
Australia which was now extended to the south of America, separated on
the maps from that continent only by the narrow Straits of Magellan, and
stretching to the westward, almost approaching New Guinea.{3}

1 As on the Ptolemy, Ulm, 1482.

2 As in Macrobius, In Sommium Scipionis Expositio, Brescia,
1483. 3 See the map of Oronce Fine, 1522, and Ortelius,
Orbis Terrarum 1592. 4 The "Quiri Regio" was long marked on
maps as a continent lying to the south of the Solomon
Islands.

3 This was first republished at Augsburg in 1611; in a
Latin transla