ABSTRACT
The geography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was certainly a picturesque coat of many colours. In a work like the present one, in which all the sciences cultivated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries receive due attention, it is not necessary to deal with the data borrowed by geography from other sciences. It will be sufficient to deal with the more specific geographical problems and achievements of the two centuries under review. Geographical exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was mainly directed to developing the discoveries of the great pioneer explorers of the preceding period. The important additions to geographical knowledge which were the fruits of the widespread explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rendered largely obsolete the traditional maps of the world, which continued to be based upon the ideas of Ptolemy of Alexandria.
