interest him. ... Of the letter to Soderini the version which has played the most important part in history is the Latin one first published at the press of the little college at Saint-Dié in Lorraine, April 25 (vij Kl' Maij), 1507. ... It was translated, not from an original text, but from an intermediate French version, which is lost. Of late years, however, we have detected, in an excessively rare Italian text, the original from which the famous Lorraine version was ultimately derived. ... If now we compare this primitive text with the Latin of the Lorraine version of 1507, we observe that, in the latter, one proper name--the Indian name of a place visited by Americus on his first voyage--has been altered. In the original it is 'Lariab;' in the Latin it has become 'Parias.' This looks like an instance of injudicious editing on the part of the Latin translator, although, of course, it may be a case of careless proof-reading. Lariab is a queer-looking word. It is no wonder that a scholar in his study among the mountains of Lorraine could make nothing of it. If he had happened to be acquainted with the language of the Huastecas, who dwelt at that time about the river Panuco--fierce and dreaded enemies of their southern neighbours the Aztecs--he would have known that names of places in that region were apt to end in ab. ... But as such facts were quite beyond our worthy translator's ken, we cannot much blame him if he felt that such a word as Lariab needed doctoring. Parias (Paria) was known to be the native name of a region on the western shores of the Atlantic, and so Lariab became Parias. As the distance from the one place to the other is more than two thousand miles, this little emendation shifted the scene of the first voyage beyond all recognition, and cast the whole subject into an outer darkness where there has been much groaning and gnashing of teeth. Another curious circumstance came in to confirm this error. On his first voyage, shortly before arriving at Lariab, Vespucius saw an Indian town built over the water, 'like Venice.' He counted 44 large wooden houses, 'like barracks,' supported on huge tree- trunks and communicating with each other by bridges that could be drawn up in case of danger. {53} This may well have been a village of communal houses of the Chontals on the coast of Tabasco; but such villages were afterwards seen on the Gulf of Maracaibo, and one of them was called Venezuela, or 'Little Venice,' a name since spread over a territory nearly twice as large as France. So the amphibious town described by Vespucius was incontinently moved to Maracaibo, as if there could be only one such place, as if that style of defensive building had not been common enough in many ages and in many parts of the earth, from ancient Switzerland to modern Siam. ... Thus in spite of the latitudes