444 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION E. 



outer Ocean towai'ds tlie east at the fabulous country Uak- 

 Uak, beyond the longitude of the Malay Peninsula, 



The voyages of Marco Polo, 1268-1295, and the enter- 

 prises conducted under the patronage of Prince Henry of 

 Portugal, 1418-1460, caused a revival of interest in the study 

 of geography. The Geographia of Ptolemy veas translated 

 into Latin by Jacobo Angelo de Scarparia in 1409, and 

 printed in 1475 at Vicenza, and in 1478 at Rome with 

 illustrative maps designed by a certain Agathodaimon, who 

 is said to have lived in the fifth century. From the time of 

 its dissemination, from 1307 onwards, the Book of Marco 

 Polo, dictated by that traveller when a prisoner in Genoa, 

 had been the great work of reference on oriental geography 

 as well as the favourite thesaurus of travel and adventure. 

 It was originally edited in a somewhat barbarous French, 

 by Ilusticien de Pise, and from that edition, or from a revised 

 vei'sion of it in purer French, several MS. translations were 

 made into Italian and Latin in the course of the fourteenth 

 century, and the work became widely known in the six- 

 teenth century from the versions of Grynseus (1532) and 

 Ramusio (1556). The earliest cai'tographer who shows 

 marks of Polo's influence is Martin Behaim (1492), and 

 thenceforward Polo's travels, with more or less understanding 

 of their author, enter into the composition of the world-maps 

 of the sixteenth century. 



Polo, in his account of Java and Sumatra, adopts a 

 phraseology of ancient date. Ptolemy applied the name 

 TajSaStou to three islands. The tei"m is a Greek form of 

 the Sanskrit " Yavadvipa " or Isle of Barley, which is found 

 in ancient inscriptions in the island of Java. The name 

 may have passed through Arabic into Greek, and been con- 

 veyed by Greek travellers to Europe. The Sanskrit name 

 of Sumatra was Prathama Yava, or the First Java, in 

 allusion perhaps to its proximity to Asia. (^Joiir. R. Asiat. 

 Soc, Bombay, 1861, Ajjp. Ixviii.) The Arab geographers 

 also recognised more than one Java, and Ibn Batuta men- 

 tions one island " Jawali " and another " Mul-Jawah," or, 

 " the original Java." As he calls the capital of a Mahometan 

 State in the former island " Somothra," it is probable that his 

 Jawah was the island now called Sumatra, and his Mul- 

 Jawah our modern Java. Polo describes one of the king- 

 doms of Javva la meneur under the name " Samara," but 

 the name Sumatra as applied to the entire island does not 

 apjiear on any European map with which I am acquainted 



