Note 15 — Chapter I

In a recent letter from Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, the distinguished bibliographer and historical scholar, of Brooklyn, N. Y.,—who has kindly communicated for my use his abundant materials relating to the Cabots, and has laid me under great obligations for aid in preparing this paper,—he says he has been collating the first part of the Summario of 1534 with the Latin Decades of Peter Martyr, and he finds them to differ in a way that no mere translator would have ventured to effect; that in one instance two books of the Decades are condensed into a few lines, and the whole worked over as an author only could do it. The Italian Summary closes at the end of the ninth book of the third Decade. He thinks that Ramusio, with the edition of 1516 before him, would not have omitted the tenth book. Mr. Brevoort therefore is led to believe that Martyr himself rewrote in 1515, in Italian, the three Decades (the last book not having yet been written) and sent the MS. to a friend in Italy, where it slumbered until 1534, when it fell into the hands of Ramusio, who committed it to the press. This is a curious question in bibliography.