OF Pomponius Mela we know little beyond the fact that he was born in Spain, not far from Gibraltar, and that he wrote, as seems probable, his popular geographical treatise in the year 43 A.D.[618] The _editio princeps_ of this treatise was printed in 1471 at Milan, it is supposed, by Antonius Zarotus, under the title _Cosmographia_. It was a small quarto of fifty-nine leaves. Two copies have been sold lately. The Sunderland copy (no. 10,117) brought £11 5_s._, and has since been held by Quaritch at £15 15_s._ Another copy was no. 897 in part iii. of the _Beckford Catalogue_. In 1478 there was an edition, _De situ orbis_, at Venice (Sunderland, no. 10,118); and in 1482 another edition, _Cosmographia geographica_, was also published at Venice (Leclerc, no. 456; Murphy, no. 2,003; D’Avezac, _Géographes Grecs et Latins_, p. 13). It was called _Cosmographia_ in the edition of 1498 (_Bibl. Amer. Vet., Additions_, no. 8; Huth, iv. 1166); _De orbis situ_ in that of Venice, 1502; _De totius orbis descriptione_ in the Paris edition of 1507, edited by Geofroy Tory (A. J. Bernard’s _Geofroy Tory, premier imprimeur royal_, Paris, 1865, p. 81; Carter-Brown, i. 32; Muller, 1872, no. 2,318; 1877, no. 2,062). [Illustration: VADIANUS. Fac-simile of a cut in Reusner’s _Icones_ (Strasburg, 1590), p. 162.] In 1512 the text of Mela came under new influences. Henry Stevens (_Bibliotheca geographica_, p. 210) and others have pointed out how a circle of geographical students at this time were making Vienna a centre of interest by their interpretation of the views of Mela and of Solinus, a writer of the third century, whose _Polyhistor_ is a description of the world known to the ancients. Within this knot of cosmographers, John Camers undertook the editing of Mela; and his edition, _De situ orbis_, was printed by Jean Singrein at Vienna in 1512, though it bears neither place nor date (Stevens, _Bibliotheca geographica_, no. 1,825; D’Avezac, _Géographes Grecs et Latins_, p. 14; Leclerc, no. 457; Sunderland, no. 10,119). Another Mela of the same year (1512) is known to have been printed by Weissenburger, presumably at Nuremberg, and edited by Johannes Cocleius as _Cosmographia Pomponii Mele: authoris nitidissimi tribus libris digesta: ... compendio Johannis Coclei Norici adaucta quo geographie principia generaliter comprehēduntur_ (Weigel, 1877, no. 227; there is a copy in Charles Deane’s library). In 1517 Mela made a part of the collection of Antonie Francino at Florence, which was reissued in 1519 and 1526 (D’Avezac, p. 16; Sunderland, nos. 10,121, 10,122).