An ornamental woodcut headpiece featuring a central empty medallion flanked by two cherub-like figures entwined with scrolling acanthus leaves and floral motifs.

TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS

AND MOST AUGUST

PRINCE AND LORD

IOHANNES GUILELMUS, DUKE OF JULICH,

CLEVES AND BERG, &c. COUNT

OF MARK AND RAVENSBERG, LORD IN

Large decorative historiated initial 'C' featuring intricate floral and vine-like scrolling patterns within a square border.

Claudius Ptolemaeus of Pelusium, the first and most ancient writer of geographers, whose geographical maps, Most Illustrious and August Prince, Io. Antonius Maginus, Professor of this study in the most celebrated gymnasium of Bologna, had brought to light with his own illustrated commentaries about two years ago, more or less, by Venetian presses. I have been moved by these reasons most of all to reprint them again at my own expense. I discovered that learned men were wonderfully affected by their reading, as it was both concise, and clear and easy; but they complained everywhere in a public mourning, so to speak, because the Venetian bookseller had not supplied enough copies of them to satisfy greedy readers, and, which is the head of the matter, had not provided them corrected. For besides the fact that most things were defiled by a lack of oversight, the very sense of the words was so obscured in many places by either a mutilated omission or a rough inversion of some dictions, that not even that Index, which the printer inserted into the book to excuse his own supine labor, could suffice for correcting all these things which a diligent and learned reader observed. To wipe away this stain, and to restore to the author his own brilliance, and to satisfy the satiety of readers by a greater abundance of copies; I therefore dedicated my effort solely to purging the Venetian copy itself of the faults by which it was tainted, before I undertook this edition.