ABSTRACT
In the academic year 1568/69 there lived in Basel two aspiring scholars and a world famous philosopher. It was the year in which Theodor Zwinger and the Dutchman Hugo Blotius, both experienced and well-travelled men, commenced their humanist friendship. Both were struggling with the problem of how empirical knowledge which had extended disquietingly fast in the age of geographical discoveries and printing, and was endangering the traditional patterns of thought, was to be brought under control. Paris became prominent in the methodological discussion of the mid-16th century. Next to Basel and Venice, it was the third city to play a decisive role in the methodizing of travel. Venice, with its traditional links to the Orient, its diplomats schooled in the observation of foreign countries, its trade in informations and its printing and publishing trade, was a "metropolis of the news", as a German studying in 1567 at Padua called it.
