The fact seems to be that Columbus knew of Polo’s revelations only at second hand, from the letters of the Florentine Paolo Toscanelli and the like; and I cannot find that he ever refers to Polo by name. [How deep was the interest taken by Colombus in Marco Polo’s travels is shown by the numerous marginal notes of the Admiral in the printed copy of the latin version of Pipino kept at the Bib.  Colombina at Seville.  See Appendix H. p. 558.—­H.  C.] Though to the day of his death he was full of imaginations about Zipangu and the land of the Great Kaan as being in immediate proximity to his discoveries, these were but accidents of his great theory.  It was the intense conviction he had acquired of the absolute smallness of the Earth, of the vast extension of Asia eastward, and of the consequent narrowness of the Western Ocean, on which his life’s project was based.  This conviction he seems to have derived chiefly from the works of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly.  But the latter borrowed his collected arguments from Roger Bacon, who has stated them, erroneous as they are, very forcibly in his Opus Majus (p. 137), as Humboldt has noticed in his Examen (vol. i. p. 64).  The Spanish historian Mariana makes a strange jumble of the alleged guides of Columbus, saying that some ascribed his convictions to “the information given by one Marco Polo, a Florentine Physician!” ("como otros dizen, por aviso que le dio un cierto Marco Polo, Medico Florentin;” Hist. de Espana, lib. xxvi. cap 3).  Toscanelli is called by Columbus Maestro Paulo, which seems to have led to this mistake; see Sign. G.  Uzielli, in Boll. della Soc.  Geog.  Ital. IX. p. 119, [Also by the same:  Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli iniziatore della scoperta d’ America, Florence, 1892; Toscanelli, No. 1; Toscanelli, Vol.  V. of the Raccolta Colombiana, 1894.—­H.  C.]

[4] “C’est diminuer l’expression d’un eloge que de l’exagerer.”
    (Humboldt, Examen, III. 13.)

[5] See vol. ii. p. 318, and vol. i. p. 404.

[6] Vol. i. p. 423.

[7] Vol. ii. p. 85, and Apollonius Rhodius, Argonaut.  II. 1012.

[8] Chinese Observers record the length of Comets’ tails by cubits!

[9] The map, perhaps, gives too favourable an idea of Marco’s geographical
    conceptions.  For in such a construction much has to be supplied for
    which there are no data, and that is apt to take mould from modern
    knowledge.  Just as in the book illustrations of ninety years ago we
    find that Princesses of Abyssinia, damsels of Otaheite, and Beauties
    of Mary Stuart’s Court have all somehow a savour of the high waists,
    low foreheads, and tight garments of 1810.