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Although the book is focused on present-day mineral collectors and their collections, the first chapter is an abbreviated history of mineralogy and mineral collecting in Brazil. He notes not just minerals but also fossils, lithic objects, meteorites, and gemstones are included in the book. Cornejo's comments can be summed up by his statement (p. 6) that the book is "A paper museum showcasing the foremost pieces of Brazilian mineral collections.". [Extracted from the article]

In the final years of the 1590s, the Dutch cartographer Petrus Plancius (1552-1622) had represented not only South America but also the ocean to the west of it, known now as the Pacific, as I America Peruana i and I Oceanus Peruvianus i respectively, metonymically claiming the entire continent for the Vice-Royalty of Peru, an interesting hint followed by Doré to understand the expectations created by the Europeans about the continent. In I Cartografia da Promessa: Potosi e o Brasil em um continente chamado Peruana i (Cartography of Promise: Potosi and Brazil in a Continent called Peruana), the historian Andréa Doré (Universidade Federal do Paraná) makes an important study of South American cartography during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Doré's approach is to track the expectations and to analyse the accounts of those who had experienced the space and narrated what they saw to show us how these narratives were portrayed on the maps. [Extracted from the article]