v.); and Pliny, quoting Eratosthenes, makes it 7000.] [Footnote 4: STRABO, lib.ii.c.v.s.

32.

Aristotle appears to have had more correct information, and says Ceylon was not so large as Britain .-- _De Mundo_ ch.

iii.] The round numbers employed by those authors, 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 probability they were indebted for their information to the stories of Arabian or Hindu sailors returning from the Eastern seas.
Pliny learned from the Singhalese Ambassador who visited Rome 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 the delusion of the magnitude of Ceylon, makes it stretch almost to the opposite coast of Africa.[2] [Footnote 1: PTOLEMY, lib.vii.c.

4.] [Footnote 2: ARRIAN, _Periplus_, p.35.Marcianus Heracleota (whose Periplus has been reprinted by HUDSON, in the same collection from which I have made the reference to that of Arrian) gives to Ceylon a length of 9500 stadia with a breadth of 7500 .-- MAR.