104 TH E INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



the coast by way of Cape Malabar, the shore never being 

 lost sight of at any time. 1 Trips to India, however, being 

 shorter, were frequent, and these were made even by the 

 Egyptians long before the Christian era. After studying 

 the periodic direction of the winds and the monsoons, one 

 Egyptian navigator, Hippalus, was bold enough to venture 

 into the open sea and to trust to the steady-blowing west 

 monsoon to waft him to the port of Musiris on the Mala- 

 bar coast. 2 His success was regarded as so extraordinary 

 that the wind was named after him, and thenceforward, on 

 Indian voyages, both the Egyptians and the Arabs, when 

 they did leave the shore, risked the venture only when 

 they could rely on the persistence of the wind, and when 

 it was fair for the course they desired to sail. 3 



It is true that the Arabs had astrolabes and other astro- 

 nomical instruments, which their pilots used for finding 

 their positions at sea; and obscure descriptions of these 

 have frequently been taken as referring to the compass. 

 The Arabs, however, never were inventors, and their early 

 knowledge was mainly derived from Greek books, from 

 which they could have learned nothing of navigation, 

 much less concerning the compass. Azuni 4 refers, more- 

 over, to a planisphere stated to be in the Treasury of St. 

 Mark in Venice, copied from one brought back by Polo, on 

 which is the explicit inscription that the ships traversing 

 the Indian Ocean u navigate without the compass, for an 

 astrologer is stationed aloft and apart from every one else, 

 with the astrolabe in his hand," and thus vessels are 

 piloted. Nicholas Visconti, 5 who made the Indian tour in 

 the middle of the i5th century, asserts positively that the 

 Indian navigators u never navigate with the compass, but 



'Renaudot : Anc. Rel. des Indes et de la Chine. Paris, 1718. 

 'Robertson: Hist. Dis. of Anc. Ind., \ 2. 



'Arrian: In Periplo Maris Erythroei. Vellanson : De 1'Inv. de la 

 Boussole. Naples, 1808. 



4 Azuni : Dissert, stir la, Boussole, cit. sup. 



5 Ramusio : Coll. Voyages. Venice, 1554, vol. i., 379. 



