ON the occasion of his visit in Feldkirch I first heard from Dr. Edward Luther Stevenson that he purposed translating the text of Ptolemy’s Geography into English. Since such a translation does not exist, either in English or in German, the information pleased me very much.

Of course I did not conceal from myself and my courageous and enterprising friend the difficulty of the task. A critical edition of the Greek text which would meet all justifiable demands has never yet appeared, nor is there any Latin, Italian or French translation extant that reproduces adequately the previously published Greek text. Dr. Stevenson knew all this; nevertheless he has taken upon himself the exceedingly meritorious labor of translating the eight books of Ptolemy’s Geography into English. After much painstaking toil the work is at last successfully completed.

Since in the course of these years I have always testified to a lively interest in the translation, it did not come to me as something unexpected when Dr. Stevenson asked me several months ago to write an introduction to his successfully completed translation of the Geography.

The wish of a scholar so illustrious for his investigations in the field of historical geography and cartography, that I would write an introduction to his translation, I could all the more readily comply with, since my own comprehensive introduction to the great Vatican publication of Ptolemy:Claudit Ptolemaei Geographiae Urbinas Codex graecus 82 phototypice depictus, has at length appeared in fair proof. The title of this introduction reads:Josephi Fischer S. J.,Commentatio de Cl. Ptolemaei vita,operibus,influxu saeculari. References to this Commentary are indicated in the following pages by the wordCommentatio.

In a manner deserving gratitude Stevenson offers, in addition to the text, a reproduction of the Ptolemy maps, from the valuable Codex Ebnerianus of the Lenox Library collection in The New York Public Library. The choice of the Codex Ebnerianus is a very fortunate one, since this Codex furnishes the original copy for the maps in the important Roman editions of Ptolemy of the years 1478, 1490, 1507, and 1508, in which the Ptol