CUAP. I.] GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION. 9 



The round numbers employed by those authors, and 

 by the Greek geographers generally, who borrow from 

 them, serve to show that their knowledge was col- 

 lected from rumours ; and that in all probability they 

 were indebted for their information to the stories of 

 Arabian or Hindu sailors returning from their Eastern 

 voyages. 



Pliny learned from the Singhalese embassy which 

 reached 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 nearly fifteen degrees, 

 with a breadth of eleven, an exaggeration of the truth 

 nearly twenty-fold. 1 Agathemerus copies Ptolemy ; and 

 the plain and sensible author of the " Periplus " 

 (attributed to ARRIAN), still labouring with delusions as to 

 the magnitude of Ceylon, makes it stretch almost to the 

 opposite coast of Africa, 2 



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 3 ; and Marco Polo, in the fourteenth century, not 

 only reiterates the usual exaggerated dimensions of the 

 island, but informs 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. 4 



1 PTOLEMY, lib. vii. c. 4. is figured in the Mappe-momles of the 



2 ARRIAX, Pcriplus, p. 35. Mar- Middle Ages, see the Essai of the 

 claims Heracleota (whose Periplus VICOMTE DE SANTAKEM, Sur la Cos- 

 has been reprinted by HCDSOX, in the moyraphic et Cartoyraphie, torn. iii. p. 

 same collection from which I have 335, &e. 



made the reference to that of Arrian) j * MARCO POLO, p. 2, c. 148. A 



gives to Ceylon a length of 9500 j later authority than Marco Polo, POR- 



Btadia with a breadth of 7500. MAR. j CACCHT, in his Isolario, or " Description 



HER. p. 26. of the most celebrated Islands in the 



3 For an account of Ceylon as it World," which was published at 



