Chap. T.] GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION. 9 



The round numbers employed by those autliors, and 

 by the Greek geographers generally, who borrow from 

 them, serve to show that their knowledge was merely 

 collected from rumours ; and that in all probabihty they 

 were indebted for their information to the stories of 

 Arabian or Hindu sailors returning from the Eastern 

 seas. 



PHny learned from the Singhalese Ambassador who 

 visited Eome in the reign of Claudius, that the breadth 

 of Ceylon was 10,000 stadia from west to east ; and 

 Ptolemy fully developed the idea of his predecessors, that 

 it lay opposite to the " Cinnamon Land," and assigned 

 to it a length from north to south of neavlj Jifteen degrees, 

 with a breadth of eleven, an exaggeration of the trutli 

 nearly twenty-fold.^ Agathemerus copies Ptolemy ; and 

 the plain and sensible author of the " Periplus " 

 (attributed to Arrian), still labouring with the delusion 

 of the magnitude of Cejdon, makes it stretch almost to 

 the opposite coast of Africa.^ 



These extravagant ideas of the magnitude of Ceylon 

 were not entirely removed till many centuries later.' 

 The Arabian geographers, Massoudi, Edrisi, and Aboul- 

 feda, had no accurate data by which to correct the 

 errors of their Greek predecessors. The maps of the 

 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries repeated their distor- 

 tions ^ ; and Marco Polo, in the fourteenth century, who 

 gives the island the usual exaggerated dimensions, yet in- 

 forms us that it is now but one half the size it had been 

 at a former period, the rest having been engulfed by the 

 sea.^ 



1 Ptolemy, lib. vii. c. 4. , is fig-ured in the Majjpe-niondes of tlie 



Abkian, Periplus, p. 35. Mar 

 cianiis Heracleota (whose Periplus 

 has been reprinted by Hudson, in the 



same collection from which I have I 335, &c 



Middle Ages, see the Essai of the 

 VicoMTE DE Santarem, Siir la Cos- 

 rnotjruphie et Cartographie, torn. iii. p. 



made the reference to that of Arrian) 

 gives to Ceylon a length of 9500 

 stadia with a breadth of 7500. — Mar. 

 Her. p. 2(3. 



^ For an account of Ceylou as it 



4 Marco Polo, p. 2, c. 148. A 

 later authority than Marco Polo, Por- 

 CACCHt, in his Isolario, or " Description 

 of the most celebrated Islands in the 

 World," which was published at 



