HER.p.

26.] These extravagant ideas of the magnitude of Ceylon were not entirely removed till many centuries later.

The Arabian geographers, Massoudi, Edrisi, and Aboulfeda, had no accurate data by which to correct the errors of their Greek predecessors.

The maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries repeated their distortions[1]; and Marco Polo, in the fourteenth century, who gives the island the usual exaggerated dimensions, yet 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.[2] [Footnote 1: For an account of Ceylon as it is figured in the _Mappe-mondes_ of the Middle Ages, see the _Essai_ of the VICOMTE DE SANTAREM, _Sur la Cosmographie et Cartographie_, tom.iii.p.335, &c.] [Footnote 2: MARCO POLO, p.

2, c.148.A later authority than Marco Polo, PORCACCHI, in his _Isolario_, or "Description of the most celebrated Islands in the World," which was published at Venice in A.D.
1576, laments his inability even at that time to obtain any authentic information as to the boundaries and dimensions of Ceylon; and, relying on the representations of the Moors, who then carried on an active trade around its coasts, he describes it as lying under the equinoctial line, and possessing a circuit of 2100 miles.