outgrowth from the civil wars of Castile) which began in May,
1475, and ended in September, 1479. M. d'Avezac thinks that the
letter to Columbus must have been written after the latter
date, or more than five years later than the enclosed letter.
M. Harrisse is somewhat less exacting, and is willing to admit
that it may have been written at any time after this war had
fairly begun,--say in the summer of 1475, not more than a year
or so later than the enclosed letter. Still he is disposed on
some accounts to put the date as late as 1482. The phrase
_alquanti giorni fa_ will not allow either of these
interpretations. It means "a few days ago," and cannot possibly
mean a year ago, still less five years ago. The Spanish
retranslator from Ulloa renders it exactly _algunos dias ha_
(Navarrete, _Coleccion_, tom. ii. p. 7), and Humboldt (_loc.
cit._) has it _il y a quelques jours_. If we could be sure that
the expression is a correct rendering of the lost Latin
original, we might feel sure that the letter to Columbus must
have been written as early as the beginning of August, 1474.
But now the great work of Las Casas, after lying in manuscript
for 314 years, has at length been published in 1875. Las Casas
gives a Spanish version of the Toscanelli letters (_Historia de
las Indias_, tom. i. pp. 92-97), which is unquestionably older
than Ulloa's Italian version, though perhaps not necessarily
more accurate. The phrase in Las Casas is not _algunos dias
ha_, but _ha dias_, i. e. not "a few days ago," but "some time
ago." Just which expression Toscanelli used cannot be
determined unless somebody is fortunate enough to discover the
lost Latin original. The phrase in Las Casas admits much more
latitude of meaning than the other. I should suppose that _ha
dias_ might refer to an event a year or two old, which would
admit of the interpretation considered admissible by M.
Harrisse. I should hardly suppose that it could refer to an
event five or six years old; if Toscanelli had been referring
in 1479 or 1480 to a letter written in 1474, his phrase would
probably have appeared in Spanish as _algunos anos ha_, i. e.
"a few years ag