I. Jose de, a Spanish writer, born about 1530, died Feb. 15, 1(500. He entered the society of Jesuits at 14, and on completing his course of study was appointed professor of theology at Ocafia. In 1571 he was sent as a missionary to South America, of which, after his return to Spain, he published a history (Historia natural y moral de las India*, Madrid, 1590). This work has been translated into several languages. He also wrote De Natura Novi Orbis, and some other works, chiefly of a polemical character.

II. Uriel, a Jewish writer, born in Oporto, Portugal, about 1590, died by his own hand in Holland in April, 1047, or, according to some accounts, in 1640. He belonged to a family converted to Christianity at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal, and was educated by Catholic teachers, but soon conceived doubts concerning the Christian doctrines. He finally fled, with his mother and a brother, to Amsterdam, embraced the faith of his ancestors, and exchanged his original name Gabriel for Uriel. He failed, however, to recognize in the rabbinical Judaism of his time the ideal of his independent speculations, and became involved in a passionate controversy with the religious heads of the Jewish congregation of Amsterdam, in the course of which, having suffered excommunication, he published in Portuguese a " Criticism of the Pharisaic Traditions, compared with the Written Law," in which he repudiated the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. He was now arraigned before the magistrates and heavily fined. After many years of exclusion from the synagogue he signed a recantation of his views, but subsequently again provoked the ire of the orthodox, among whom were his own relatives, was a second time excommunicated, and finally submitted to an ignominious public chastisement.

Maddened by persecution, he put an end to his life by a pistol shot, leaving an autobiography, which was published in Latin and German in 1687.

III. Joaquin, a South American historian, colonel of engineers in the Colombian service, died about 1862. In 1834 he explored the valleys of the Socorro and Magdalena rivers with the botanist Cespedes, and in 1841 made researches relative to the Chibchas and other aboriginal tribes. He continued these investigations in the archives of Spain and France, and in 1848 published in Paris Compendio historico del descubrimiento y colonization de la Nueva Granada, en el siglo decimo sexto. In 1849, in conjunction with M. A. Laserre, he published a new and enlarged edition of the celebrated Semenario de la Nueva Granada, with a biographical notice of the author, the learned Caldas, who was shot in 1810. A series of archa3ological essays were furnished by Acosta, for publication, to the Paris geographical society, 1854 et seq.