214 COSMOS. 



of facts, even from the discoveries of the Portuguese and Span- 

 iards. Within fifty years after the death of the Prophet, the 

 Arabs had already reached the extremest western coasts of 

 Africa and the port of Asfi. Whether the islands of the 

 £ruansches were visited by Arabian vessels subsequently, as I 

 was long disposed to conjecture, to the expedition of the so- 

 called Almagrurin adventurers to the Ma7'e tenebrosum, is a 

 question thaf has again been lately regarded as doubtful.* 

 The presence of a great quantity of Arabian coins, found bur- 

 i-^d in the lands of the Baltic, and in the extreme northern 

 parts of Scandinavia, is not to be ascribed to direct inter- 

 •^ourse with Arabian vessels in those regions, but to the wide- 

 ly-diffused inland trade of the Arabs. f 



Geography was no longer limited to a representation of the 

 relations of space, and the determinations of latitude and lon- 

 gitude, which had been multiplied by Abul-Hassan, or to a 

 description of river districts and mountain chains ; but it rath- 

 er led the people, already familiar with nature, to an acquaint- 

 ance with the organic products of the soil, especially those of 

 the vegetable world. | The repugnance entertained by all the 



Ouseley published in London in 1800, is that of Abu-Ishak el-Istachri, 

 and, as Frahn has shown (Ibn Fozlan, p. ix., xxii., and 256-263), is 

 half -1 century older than Ebn-Haukal. The maps which accompany 

 the " Book of Climates^^ of the year 920, and of which there is a fine 

 manuscript copy in the library of Gotha, have afforded me much aid in 

 my observations on the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral {Asie Centrale, 

 t. ii., p. 192-196). We have lately been put in possession of an edition 

 of IstAchri, and a German translation {Liber Climatum, ad similittidinem 

 Codicis Oothani delineandum, cur. J. H. Moeller, Goth., 1839 ; Das 

 Buch der Lander, translated from the Arabic by A. D. Mordtmanu, 

 Hamb., 1845). 



* Compare Joaquioi Jose da Costa de Macedo, Memoria em que se 

 fretende provar que as Arabes nao conkecerao as Canarias antes dot 

 Portuguezes (Lisboa, 1844, p. 86-99, 205-227, with Humboldt, Examen 

 Crit. de V Hist, de la Geograpkie, t. ii., p. 137-141. 



t Leopold von Ledebur, Ueber die in den Baltischen Ldndern gefun 

 denen Zeugnisse eines Handels-Verkehrs mit deni Orient zur Zeit der 

 Arabischen Weltherrschaft, 1840, s. 8 und 75. 



t The determinations of longitude which Abul-Hassan All of Moroc- 

 co, an astronomer of the thirteenth century, has embodied in his work 

 on the astronomical instruments of the Arabs, are all calculated from 

 the first meridian of Aiiu. M. Sedillot the younger first directed tha 

 attention of geographers to this meridian. I have also made it an ob- 

 ject of careful inquiry, because Columbus, who was always guided b) 

 Cardinal d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, in his fantasies regarding the difference 

 of form between the eastern and western hemispheres, makes mention 

 of an Isla de Arin: "centro de el hemispherio del quel hablc Tolorvea 

 y qu^s debaxo la linea equinoxial entre el Sino Arabico y air-uel dv 

 Persia." (Compare J. J. Sedillot, Trait6 des Instrumens Astronnmitmtu 



