knowledge, about Cape Non on the west and Cape Guardafui on the east;
and the "Cinnamon-bearing Coast," between these points, was fringed by
the Mountains of Æthiopia, where the Nile rose. This was the theory
which revived on the decline of the Ptolemaic, and which encouraged the
Portuguese sailors with hopes of a quick approach to India round Africa,
as the great eastern bend of the Guinea coast seemed to suggest.
Further, on this pre-Ptolemaic map the Southern Ocean was left untouched
by a supposed Southern Continent, and except for an undue shrinkage of
the Old World in general as an island in the midst of the vast
surrounding ocean, a reliable description of Western Asia and Central
Europe and North Africa was in the hands of the learned world two
hundred years before Christ.

It is true that Strabo's China is cramped and cut short; that his Ceylon
(Taprobane) is even larger than Ptolemy's; that Ireland (Ierne) appears
to the _north_ of Britain; and that the Caspian joins the North Sea by a
long and narrow channel; but the true shape of India, of the Persian
Gulf and the Euxine, of the Sea of Azov and the Mediterranean, is marked
rightly enough in general outline. This earlier chart has not the
elaborate completeness of Ptolemy's, but it is free from his enormous
errors, and it has all the advantage of science, however imperfect, over
brilliant guessing.

Of course, even in Ptolemy, this guess-work pure and simple only comes
in at intervals and does not so much affect the central and, for his
day, far more important tracts of the Old World, but we have yet to see
how, in the mediæval period and under Arabic imagination, all geography
seemed likely to become an exercise of fancy.

The chief Greek descriptions of the world, we must clearly remember,