In most of the older surveys of the known world America counts as the fourth part, naturally coming after Europe, Asia, and Africa. Even that arrangement was not generally accepted. Joannes Leo (Hasan Ibn Muhammad, al-Wazzan), writing in 1556, properly called Africa "la tierce Partie du Monde;" but the Seigneur de la Popellinière, in his "Les Trois Mondes," published in 1582, divided the globe into three parts--1. Europe, Asia, and Africa; 2. America, and 3. Australia. A half century later, Pierre d'Avitz, of Toumon (Ardèche), entitled one of his compositions "Description Générale de l'Amérique troisiesme partie du Monde," first published in 1637.{2} The expedition under Alvaro de Mendana de Nevra, setting sail from Callao, November 19, 1567, and steering westward, sought to clear doubt concerning a continent which report had pictured as being somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The Solomon Islands rewarded the enterprise, and with New Guinea and the Philippines completed a connection between Peru and the continent of Asia. There had long existed, however, a settled belief in the existence of a great continent in the southern hemisphere, which should serve as a counterpoise to the known lands in the northern. 1 A copy is in the Boston Athenaeum. The geographical ideas of the times required such a continent, [44]and even before the circumnavigation of Africa, the world-maps indicated to the southward "terra incognita secundum Ptolemeum,"{1} or a land of extreme temperature and wholly unknown.{2} The sailing of ships round the Cape of Good Hope dissipated in some degree this belief but it merely placed some distance between that cape and the supposed Terra Australia which was now extended to the south of America, separated on the maps from that continent only by the narrow Straits of Magellan, and stretching to the westward, almost approaching New Guinea.{3} 1 As on the Ptolemy, Ulm, 1482. 2 As in Macrobius, In Sommium Scipionis Expositio, Brescia, 1483. 3 See the map of Oronce Fine, 1522, and Ortelius, Orbis Terrarum 1592. 4 The "Quiri Regio" was long marked on maps as a continent lying to the south of the Solomon Islands. 3 This was first republished at Augsburg in 1611; in a Latin translation in Henry Hudson's Descriptio ac Delimeatis, Amsterdam, 1612, in Dutch, Verhael van seher Memorial, Amsterdam, 1612; in Bry, 1613, and shortly after in Hulsius; in French, Paris, 1617; and in English, London, 1617. I give this list because even so interesting an announcement of a genuine voyage did not have so quick an acceptance as Neville's tract with almost the same title.