The book required by this contest must be of a different nature: it must be comprehensive and synoptic, and must be sufficiently concise without being either obscure or dry. Although there is an abundance of histories of America, of voyages and discoveries, of geographic science, and of the establishment of Europeans in remote regions of the earth, there is no book that sets forth as it can be done the combined efforts of the nations of the Iberian peninsula, who, since the commencement of the XVth century, have, with a fixity of purpose and marvelous tenacity, in almost a single century of silent efforts brought about the exploration of vast continents and islands, traversed seas never before cut by Christian prows, and in emulous strife obtained almost a complete knowledge of the planet on which we live. There is a growing interest and manifest unity in all those more important events; not to mention the circumstantial evidence borne by the charts of 1375 and the semi-fabulous voyages, such as that of Doria y Vivaldi and others less apocryphal though isolated and barren of results, like that of Ferrer, begun in 1434, when Gil Eannes doubled Cape Bojador, discovered Guinea, and dispelled the terror inspired by the unknown ocean, and ended in 1522 with Elcano's arrival at Sanlucar after circumnavigating the globe. In all this activity very little occurs by chance. The progressive series of geographic discoveries, due to persistent premeditation and not to accident, was inaugurated at Sagres by the Infante D. Enrique and his illustrious pilot Jaime de Mallorca. Well might Pedro Nuñes exclaim that from that time forth until the form and size of the terraqueous globe were thoroughly known, the most to be obtained would not be firmly established, "unless our mariners sailed away better instructed and provided with better instruments and rules of Astronomy and Geography than the things with which cosmographers supplied them." The culmination in the progress of that beautiful history falls on the 12th of October, 1492, when Columbus was the first European to set foot upon the intertropical shores of the New World. But this act, considered apart from its intrinsic value, as purely the individual inspiration of a mariner and the generous enthusiasm of a patron Queen, derives a higher value when regarded as part of a summation of efforts, a grand development of an idea, a purpose to explore and know the whole globe, to spread the name and the law of Christ together with the civilization of Europe, and to reap a harvest of gold, spices, and all the riches of which costly samples and exaggerated reports were furnished by the traffic of the Venetians, Genoese and Catalonians, who in turn got them from Mussulmans.