t8 FRENCH MAPS. 



reduced copy of the above-mentioned map), Colonel Lloyd 

 makes this ingenuous admission : " For the detail of the 

 interior I cannot claim the slightest pretensions to correctness. 

 It is only an attempt to form approximately some foundation 

 for future inquiries and more correct and extensive research." 

 And yet this map, confessedly so problematical, appears to 

 have been the source of most subsequent maps of the island 

 as given in English books or published separately. 



The coast-line of Madagascar, with a narrow strip of 

 country bordering the sea, was accurately surveyed by Cap- 

 tain W. F. W. Owen, E.N., of H.M.S. Leven and Barracouta, 

 about forty-seven years ago. This survey was published by 

 the Admiralty, and Captain Owen described his experiences 

 in a book entitled Narrative of Voyages to Explore the 

 Shores of Africa, Arabia, and Madagascar, <^^c. (London, 



1833). 



With regard to the later French maps of Madagascar, 

 they also appear to have been chiefly constructed from 

 verbal information, with an occasional itinerary of a priest, 

 or naturalist, or trader; for the interior detail of most of 

 them prior to 1870 seems little more reliable than that 

 given in the English maps. (The island has been crossed 

 in various directions by a good many travellers, as shown 

 in a valuable list of routes compiled by M. Grandidier, and 

 given in a paper published in the Bidlctin de la Socidte de 

 Gdograpliie [Avril 1872, pp. 408-411]; but very few of 

 these travellers have left any accurate observations or scien- 

 tific surveys of the line of country they traversed.) How 

 some of these French maps have been constructed is amusingly 

 described by M. Grandidier in a paper upon the island before 

 the Paris GeogTaphical Society. Speaking of a book by a 

 ]M. Leguevel de Lacombe, entitled Voyage d Madagascar, he 

 says : " Tliis writer relates that he has at different periods 

 traversed the island from north to south, from east to west ; 

 he gives the most precise details of his journeys. M. de 

 Lacombe has told me, and I am myself well assured of it, 

 with his book in my hand, that he has never left the east 

 coast! It is from his imagination that he has drawn the 

 accounts, to which geographers have attached so much impor- 



