Servetus’s liberal elementary education, therefore, stood him in good stead at this time; for the Trechsels ere long, instead of holding him to the subordinate though still important duties of reader and corrector, engaged him further as editor of various costly works that issued from their press. Among the number of these a handsome edition of the Geography of Ptolemy[36] deserves particular mention, both as evincing the good repute in which he stood when we find him entrusted with such a work, and also as showing the extent of his reading and general knowledge--strangely enough, also, as influencing in some remote degree the fate that finally befel him. Earlier editions of the Ptolemy were faulty in several ways, and disfigured in different degrees by errors due, in part at least, to indifferent editing. These, where literal, Villanovanus corrected in the new issue; and where the sense was obscure through faulty wording, he brought light by the better readings he supplied, having formed his text, as he says, by collating all the editions he could lay his hands on, and where these gave him no aid, by suggestions of his own. In his address to the reader, our editor, whom we shall often speak of under his adopted name of Villanovanus, gives a short account of his author, Claudius Ptolemæus, his birth-place, the Roman emperors under whom he flourished, ‘his knowledge of philosophy and the mathematics, and the more than Herculean glory he achieved by his successful but peaceful invasion of so many lands. Nor indeed was this all, for he may be said to have bound earth to heaven by assimilating the measurements of the one to those of the other; and, coming after Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela, he as far surpassed them, as they excelled all the geographers who had gone before them.’