OR COSMOGRAPHY.

The ratio of the provinces of the world established from the Heaven.

Since the scope of all well-ordered scripture is to show that God has care for human affairs, I must endeavor to demonstrate the institution, duration, success, and destruction of the possessions of this world according to the election of God and the influx of the minister of Heaven itself: one part of which I must seek from the progeny of Shem, Japheth, and Ham taken from sacred texts, and the other I must treat from celestial discipline. Therefore, Moses and Ptolemy will be brought forward by me as the basis for my treatise. Furthermore, so that counsel might also be provided for those who are versed in the curriculum of the humanities, I shall bring forward a compendium of Ptolemaic Geography after the principal places, as Glareanus plucked it from Ptolemy, with necessary additions and changes, and finally an observation of Ptolemy's tables adapted to the ratios of longitude and latitude. Therefore, Ptolemy in the second book of the Tetrabiblos exposed those regions to us which are placed under the twelve primary parts of the heaven. But the wonderful providence of God caused that, although Astronomy is never seen to agree with Holy Scripture, nevertheless the disciplines, however distant their authors, demonstrate the same ratio of eternal disposition. Therefore, according to the sacred texts, the first peoples of the world are in the progeny of Japheth...