Still in the infancy of geographical knowledge, and before Ceylon had been circumnavigated by Europeans, the mythical delusions of the Hindus were transmitted to the West, and the dimensions of the island were expanded till its southern extremity fell below the equator, and its breadth was prolonged till it touched alike on Africa and China.[1]

[Footnote 1:  GIBBON, ch. xxiv.]

The Greeks who, after the Indian conquests of Alexander, brought back the earliest accounts of the East, repeated them without material correction, and reported the island to be nearly twenty times its actual extent.  Onesicritus, a pilot of the expedition, assigned to it a magnitude of 5000 stadia, equal to 500 geographical miles.[1] Eratosthenes attempted to fix its position, but went so widely astray that his first (that is his most southern) parallel passed through it and the “Cinnamon Land,” the Regio Cinnamomifera, on the east coast of Africa.[2] He placed Ceylon at the distance of seven days’ sail from the south of India, and he too assigned to its western coast an extent of 5000 stadia.[3] Both those authorities are quoted by Strabo, who says that the size of Taprobane was not less than that of Britain.[4]

[Footnote 1:  STRABO, lib. v.  Artemidorus (100 B.C.), quoted by Stephanus of Byzantium, gives to Ceylon a length of 7000 stadia and a breadth of 500.]

[Footnote 2:  STRABO, lib. ii. c. i. s. 14.]

[Footnote 3:  The text of Strabo showing this measure makes it in some places 8000 (Strabo, lib. 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.  HER. p. 26.]