The originals of the letters, as has already been said, are not, so far as is known, in existence; it is even uncertain whether they were written in Latin, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese. Nor has the book which Vespucci said he had prepared—“The Four Voyages”—ever been found; but Humboldt believed that the collected narrative first published at St.-Dié in 1507, in the _Cosmographiæ introductio_ of Hylacomylus, was made up of extracts from that book. This St.-Dié edition was in Latin, translated, the editor says, from the French.[463] There is in the British Museum a rare work of four pages, published also in 1507, the author of which was Walter Lud. This Lud was the secretary of the Duke of Lorraine, a canon of the St.-Dié Cathedral, and the founder of the school or college, where he had set up a printing-press on which was printed the _Cosmographiæ introductio_. From this little book it is learned that the Vespucci letters were sent from Portugal to the Duke of Lorraine in French, and that they were translated into Latin by another canon of the St.-Dié Cathedral, one Jean Basin de Sandacourt, at the request of Lud.[464] Vespucci’s last two voyages were made, so his letters assert, in the service of the King of Portugal. The narrative of the first of these—the third of the four voyages—appeared at different times, at several places, and were addressed to more than one person, prior to the publication of the St.-Dié edition of all the letters addressed to René II., the Duke of Lorraine. This fact has added to the confusion and doubt; for each of these copies sent to different persons was a translation, presumably from some common original. One copy of them was addressed to Pietro Soderini, Gonfaloniere of Florence, whom Vespucci claimed as an old friend and school-fellow under the instruction of his uncle, Giorgi Antonio Vespucci; another was sent to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’ Medici,—Vespucci’s early employer,—both appearing prior to that addressed in the collected edition of St.-Dié addressed to the Duke of Lorraine. Of the earlier editions there was one published, according to Humboldt, in Latin, in 1504, at Augsburg and also at Paris; another in German, in 1505, at Strasburg, and in 1506 at Leipsic; and still another in Italian at Vicenza, in the collection called _Paesi novamente_, simultaneously with the St.-Dié edition of 1507. These in later years were followed by a number of other editions. While they agree as to general statement, they differ in many particulars, and especially in regard to dates. These, however, are often mere typographical blunders or errors of copyists, not unusual at that era, and always fruitful of controversy. But upon one point, it is to be observed, there is no difference among them; the voyage of 1501—the first from Portugal—is always the third of the four voyages of Vespucci. This disposes, as Humboldt points out, of the charge that Vespucci waited till after the death of Columbus, in 1506, before he