VII

NOTICE.

of the Cathedral of Seville, Don Andrés Gasco, to the House of Trade, and subsequently acquired by Don Luis de Salazar, after having belonged to the Monastery of Montserrat, which the learned chronicler had inherited along with his copious and rich library. But if the transcript of the aforementioned books deserved total trust, having been made under the surveillance of the mentioned Schoolmaster; and if the original codices, retouched and added to by the author, although pitifully mutilated of some pages, were the most certain proof of the work already verified and the clearest guide for what was necessary to undertake, it was still not possible to declare the General and Natural History of the Indies complete, since Book XXVIII—which Cerdá could not find either, according to the testimony of Baena—did not exist in the copy or in the autograph. Further diligence had to be practiced, therefore, in order to fill that gap, and the success that has crowned these efforts could not be more satisfactory. Book XXVIII, with some chapters of the previous one, of which there was no prior news, has been found, then, among other papers proceeding from the extinct Jesuit archive, in a folio volume of four hundred and thirty pages, it being certain, due to the identity of the handwriting, that it was detached in the past from the transcript made by the Schoolmaster of Seville, a transcript that belonged—before passing to the library of His Majesty—to that of the Count of Torre-Palma ³.

With this reliable data, it was no longer so difficult to carry out the work, which had been interrupted so many times and was now entrusted exclusively to the zeal of the academician Don José Amador de los Rios. The verification of the previously collected books, as well as the copying and collating of those newly found, have required arduous and lengthy tasks, which, completed in a short time, nevertheless gave the Academy the certainty that the first part of the General and Natural History of the Indies could be published, as complete and authoritative as is possible today, having fortunately obtained the originals. To supply the small gaps that appeared in these, the edition of 1535 has been kept in mind, which has seemed more authentic and secure than that of 1547, not only because the author himself attended to it, but also because he makes no mention of the second in the manuscripts MSS., to which he was giving the final polish in 1548, as is noted in many passages of the History and remarked upon in the Life and Writings of Oviedo.

The utmost care has been placed in this edition, ensuring it does not lose the high regard formed regarding the General and Natural History of the Indies by all the writers who mention it. The Academy has not only believed that it should attend to preserving with the utmost care the diction of Oviedo, but also his peculiar spelling. The variety observed in the autograph

3 This is stated on the last page of the first volume; but attending to the news that Baena gives of the two volumes that the Marquis of los Trujillos possessed, and considering that the two thick volumes of the patrimonial library of His Majesty that we have before us are ancient copies of the codices of the House of Trade of Seville, as is expressed in the note with which they end, written by the hand of Antonio Gasco, nephew and amanuensis of the Schoolmaster, it becomes known that the referred volumes are one and the same, it appearing probable that they passed from the library of the Marquis of los Trujillos to the library of the Count of Torre-Palma.