The author's Letter Dedicatory to Ascanio Colonna, Abbot of St. Sophia, is undated, but it contains a passage which incidentally throws light on the bibliography of the _Galatea_. Speaking of his military service under Ascanio Colonna's father, Cervantes mentions his late chief--_aquel sol de la milicia que ayer nos quitó el cielo delante de los ojos_--in terms which imply that Marco Antonio Colonna's death was a comparatively recent event. Now, we know from the official death-certificate[19] that the Viceroy of Sicily, when on his way to visit Philip II., died at Medinaceli on August 1, 1584--exactly six months after the _Aprobación_ for the _Galatea_ had been obtained. Allowing for the rate at which news travelled in the sixteenth century, it seems improbable that Cervantes can have written his dedication much before the end of August 1584. It is conceivable, no doubt, that he wrote two different dedications--one for the alleged Madrid edition of 1584, and another for the Alcalá edition of 1585. It is equally conceivable that though the Alcalá edition of the _Galatea_, in common with every subsequent work by Cervantes, has a dedication, the supposititious Madrid edition was (for some reason unknown) published without one. Manifestly, one of these alternatives must be adopted by believers in the imaginary _princeps_. But, curiously enough, the point does not appear to have occurred to them; for, up to the present time, no such hypothesis has been advanced. Assuming, as we may fairly assume, that only one dedication was written, the complete manuscript of the _Galatea_ cannot well have reached the compositors till September or October 1584. It is possible that some part of the text was set up before this date, but of this we have no proof. If the 375 leaves--750 pages--of which the book consists were struck off late in January or early in February 1585, so as to allow of the text being revised by the official corrector at Alcalá de Henares, and thence forwarded to Madrid by the beginning of March, it must be admitted that the achievement did credit to the country printer, Juan de Gracián, whose name figures on the title-page. Further, as Salvá[20] shrewdly remarks, the appearance of the Colonna escutcheon on this same title-page affords a presumption that the Alcalá edition of 1585 is the _princeps_: for it is unreasonable to suppose that a struggling provincial publisher of the sixteenth century would go to the expense of furnishing a simple reprint with a complimentary woodcut.