The accounts given by Marco Polo and Sir John Maundeville of their explorations towards China confirmed the exaggerated idea of the extent of Eastern Asia.
CARDINAL ALIACO'S "COSMOGRAPHIA." But of all the works of learned men, that which, according to Ferdinand Columbus, had most weight with his father, was the "Cosmographia" of Cardinal Aliaco.

And this book affords a good illustration of the then state of scientific knowledge.

Learned arguments are interspersed with the most absurd fables of lion-bodied men and dog-faced women; grave, and sometimes tolerably sound, disquisitions on the earth's surface are mixed up with the wildest stories of monsters and salamanders, of giants and pigmies.

It is here that we find the original of our modern acquaintance, the sea-serpent, described as being "of huge size, so that he kills and devours large stags, and is able to cross the ocean;" and the wonders of the unknown world are enunciated with a circumstantial minuteness which must have easily won the credence of a willing disciple like Columbus.

He was also confirmed in his views of the existence of a western passage to the Indies by Paulo Toscanelli, the Florentine philosopher, to whom much credit is due for the encouragement he afforded to the enterprise.