It was only on emerging from the general ignorance of the Middle Ages that the doubt was first promulgated.  In the Catalan Map of A.D. 1375, entitled Image du Monde, Ceylon is omitted, and Taprobane is represented by Sumatra (MALTE BRUN, Hist. de Geogr. vol. i, p. 318); in that of Fra Mauro, the Venetian monk, A.D. 1458, Seylan is given, but Taprobane is added over Sumatra.  A similar error appears in the Mappe-monde, by RUYCH, in the Ptolemy of A.D. 1508, and in the writings of the geographers of the sixteenth century, GEMMA FRISIUS, SEBASTIAN MUNSTER, RAMUSIO, JUL.  SCALIGER, ORTELIUS, and MERCATOR.  The same view was adopted by the Venetian NICOLA DI CONTI, in the first half of the fifteenth century, by the Florentine ANDREA CORSALI, MAXIMILIANUS TRANSYLVANUS, VARTHEMA, and PIGAFETTA.  The chief cause of this perplexity was, no doubt, the difficulty of reconciling the actual position and size of Ceylon with the dimensions and position assigned to it by Strabo and Ptolemy, the latter of whom, by an error which is elsewhere explained, extended the boundary of the island far to the east of its actual site.  But there was a large body of men who rejected the claim of Sumatra, and DE BARROS, SALMASIUS, BOCHART CLUVERIUS, CELLARIUS, ISAAC VOSSIUS and others, maintained the title of Ceylon.  A Mappe-monde of A.D. 1417, preserved in the Pitti Palace at Florence compromises the dispute by designating Sumatra Taprobane Major.  The controversy came to an end at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the overpowering authority of DELISLE resolved the doubt, and confirmed the modern Ceylon as the Taprobane of antiquity.  WILFORD, in the Asiatic Researches (vol. x. p. 140), still clung to the opposite opinion, and KANT undertook to prove that Taprobane was Madagascar.]

Latitude and Longitude.—­There has hitherto been considerable uncertainty as to the position assigned to Ceylon in the various maps and geographical notices of the island:  these have been corrected by more recent observations, and its true place has been ascertained to be between 5 deg. 55’ and 9 deg. 51’ north latitude, and 79 deg. 41’ 40” and 81 deg. 54’ 50” east longitude.  Its extreme length from north to south, from Point Palmyra to Dondera Head, is 271-1/2 miles; its greatest width 137-1/2 miles, from Colombo on the west coast to Sangemankande on the east; and its area, including its dependent islands, 25,742 miles, or about one-sixth smaller than Ireland.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Down to a very recent period no British colony was more imperfectly surveyed and mapped than Ceylon; but since the recent publication by Arrowsmith of the great map by General Fraser, the reproach has been withdrawn, and no dependency of the Crown is more richly provided in this particular.  In the map of Schneider, the Government engineer in 1813, two-thirds of the Kandyan Kingdom are a blank; and in that of the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, re-published