say of others (such as) birds? which are so numerous, and of so many kinds, and of such various-coloured plumages, that it is a marvel to behold them.  The soil is very pleasant and fruitful, full of immense woods and forests:  and it is always green, for the foliage never drops off.  The fruits are so many that they are numberless and entirely different from ours.  This land is within the torrid zone, close to or just under the parallel described by the Tropic of Cancer:  where the pole of the horizon has an elevation of 23 degrees, at the extremity of the second climate.  Many tribes came to see us, and wondered at our faces and our whiteness:  and they asked us whence we came:  and we gave them to understand that we had come from heaven, and that we were going to see the world, and they believed it.  In this land we placed baptismal fonts, and an infinite (number of) people were baptized, and they called us in their language Carabi, which means men of great wisdom.

[1] Americus Vespucius was born in Florence in 1452 and died in Seville in 1512.  He was the son of a notary in Florence, was educated by a Dominican friar and became a clerk in one of the commercial houses of the Medici.  By this house he was sent to Spain in 1490.  He remained some years in Seville, where he became connected with the house which fitted out the second expedition of Columbus.

Vespucius claimed to have been four times in America, first in May, 1497; second, in May, 1499; third, in May, 1501; fourth, in June, 1503.  In writing of the first expedition he says his ship reached a coast “which we thought to be that of the continent,” giving date.  If this assumption be correct, and the dates correct, they would show that he reached the continent of North America a week or two before the Cabots made their discovery farther north, but this contention has never been satisfactorily supported.

The letters of Vespucius describing his four voyages were published originally in Italian in Florence in 1505-6.  The letter here in part given was addrest by Vespucius to Soderini, the Gonfalonier of Florence.  The translation, by one “M.K.,” was published by Mr. Quaritch, the London bookseller, in 1885, and has been printed as one of the “Old South Leaflets!” The letter is believed to have been composed by Vespucius within a month after his return from his second voyage.

Vespucius was a naval astronomer.  He has been unjustly accused of appropriating to himself an honor which belonged to Columbus,—­that of giving a name to the new continent.  This injustice, however, was not due to Vespucius, but to a German schoolmaster named Hylacomylus, or “Miller of the Wood-pond,” who published a book in 1507.  The passage in Millers book in which he made a suggestion which the world has adopted is as follows: 

“And the fourth part of the world having been discovered by Americus, it