HI ST OR Y OF DISCO VFR Y AND EXPL ORATION 7 
island ''He Dauphine,” an appellation which did not, 
however, gain permanent acceptance. 
The name ot Madagascar seems to be of foreign origin, 
coming probably from East Africa. The Malagasy them¬ 
selves did not know this name originally, and when they 
wished to designate the island as a whole they used 
different circumlocutions, as, Izao rehetra izao or Ny tany 
rehdra^ i.e. "all this country”, or even Ny anivon ny 
inaka (literally "in the country that lies in the midst of 
the sea”). It is peculiarly interesting to us that early 
travellers give us wonderfully glowing accounts of the 
island and of its marvellous fertility, and sometimes 
consider the inhabitants as the happiest people on the 
earth. 
The orrowth of our knowledge of the district can be 
accurately followed by means of the numerous maps in 
existence, most of them, however, of doubtful value. Alfred 
Grandidier has taken the trouble to make a collection 
of these maps and to reproduce them in an excellent 
manner in numerous pages of his Histoire de la 
Geographie de Madagascar.” The map by Edrisi of 1153 
is in great degree a product of the imagination, and even 
Martin Behaim, who depended upon the confused infor¬ 
mation of Marco Polo, gave quite an arbitrary shape to 
the island on his globe. The first useful map, the first 
which gives the general outline of the island with any 
correspondence to the reality, is of the year 1517. It 
was executed in Seville by the celebrated Portuguese 
geographer, Pedro Reinel. A great number of later maps 
are obviously only copies of this, and even the large 
scale productions of Elacourt (1656) and of Benjowski, 
so renowned for his extravagances, are obviously based 
upon the map of Pedro Reinel. 
We may recognize a real advance in the cartographic 
sketch of d’Apres Manevillette (1775). It is confined 
to the circuit of the coast and gives no kind of topo- 
