Villanovanus’s edition of the Ptolemy is certainly an advance on that of Bilibald Pirckheimer, which formed its groundwork; but it is not so free from literal errors as the laudatory address of the editor might lead us to expect. And it would have been better had he said that he had enlarged and improved the short and meagre scholia of his editorial predecessor than spoken as if he had supplied them wholly of himself. Villanovanus’s improved comments, however, impress us very favourably with a sense of the pains he must have bestowed on the work, and arouse our respect for the extent and variety of the reading he had undertaken to obtain the information he brings to bear on the physical aspects and natural productions of the several countries described, as well as of the customs, manners, and moral qualities of their inhabitants. Now it was that the smattering of geographic and historic lore he may have picked up as a student at Saragossa and elsewhere stood him in good stead, enabling him, as it did, to advance and profit by the ample stores of information of the kind which the city of Lyons placed within his reach. Living immediately after the age of the great navigators--Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, the Vespucii, and the rest--and in the very days when the works of Peter Martyr of Anghiera, Simon Grynæus, Sebastian Munster, and others enabled the educated to acquire something like a true knowledge of the world they lived in, the new edition of Ptolemy by Michael Villanovanus was a happy thought, and contributed, we need not doubt, no less to his own development than to the spread of useful and humanising information. Engaged on the Ptolemy, the super-subtleties of scholasticism and theology seem to have vanished before the light of the more positive kind of knowledge that now broke around him. When we turn to the writings of the able individuals mentioned above, we have no difficulty in discovering whence Servetus had most, perhaps all, of his geographical and astronomical knowledge. The Opus Epistolarum of Angleria, in particular, seems to have been the mine from whence he made himself rich in mental wealth of many kinds. We find him imitating, and even improving upon, the lines which head Angleria’s _De Rebus Oceanicis_ and Grynæus’s _Typi Cosmographici_, as the reader may see by comparing the verse below[37] with the one he will find further on, which is prefixed to the 2nd edition of the Ptolemy. Turning to the Scholia of Villanovanus, we find it not a little interesting in these days to have a glimpse of ourselves in our sires, and of our neighbours in theirs, from the pen of a man of genius hard upon three centuries and a half ago; and as Michael Servetus is really only known to us through his works and the judicial trials he underwent, we make no apology for referring briefly to his additions to the bald and matter-of-fact text of the original Ptolemy.