The details given in this part of our Chronicle are, in our opinion, so important for the information they give about the state of knowledge among our first discoverers, the influences of ancient tradition, and the mediæval spirit which dominated them, that it seems opportune to indicate here to the reader what we consider most worthy of study and of reflection, in order that we may be able to estimate the state of instruction in Portugal relative to those matters in the beginning of the fifteenth century, seeing that up to now no (writing) work has yet appeared upon the subject from any one of our nation. Among other passages of this Chronicle we noted, on p. 156, note 128, the extraordinary exaggeration with which our seamen described the beak of the _Buceros Africanus_, of which they said "the mouth and maw of these birds is so great that the leg of a man, however large it were, could go into it as far as the knee." We have also seen another marvellous description of the beak of the _Phœnicopterus_, and finally the one which was inspired by the account given them of the elephant by the Negroes--an exaggeration which reminds one of the description given by a Byzantine writer of the eleventh century, Michael Attaliotes, when he saw an elephant for the first time in Constantinople (see the extract from the Greek MSS. of the Royal Library at Paris [Bibliothèque Nationale], on p. 499 of the work of M. Berger de Xivrey: _Recits de l'antiquité sur quelques points de la fable, du merveilleux et de l'histoire naturelle_). In these exaggerated and marvellous accounts, therefore, of birds and animals which were unknown as late as then, we find a proof of the influence of the teratological traditions of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, in consequence of the studies which men had previously made of the figures they saw depicted in the planispheres and Mappemondes of their time; and also we may see in this a result of the reading of Pliny, and above all of the _Treatise on Marvels_, attributed to Aristotle, "the philosopher," as Azurara calls him (see p. 12, note 19), whose authority was so great among the Portuguese of the fifteenth century that even the "Proctors of the People" (in the _Cortes_ of 1481), quoted his work on "Politics" (see our _Memoir on the Cortes_, ii, p. 186). We see, then, that our seamen of that period were impregnated with these traditions, and were diligent readers of works which during the Middle Ages were given the title of _Mirabilia_, the reading of which enchanted (in that age) not only men of education, but even students, and often the people, to whom ecclesiastics read in public those marvellous relations, as we see, among other examples from the case of Giraldus Cambrensis, who thrice read to the people in Oxford his description of Ireland; and still more in the celebrated statutes made in 1380 by Bishop Wykeham for the college which he founded in the same city, in which he determined that