[Footnote 3:  PLINY, 1. vi. c. 24.]

In the treatise De Mundo, which is ascribed to ARISTOTLE[1], Taprobane is mentioned incidentally as of less size than Britain; and this is probably the earliest historical notice of Ceylon that has come down to us[2] as the memoirs of Alexander’s Indian officers, on whose authority Aristotle (if he be the author of the treatise “De Mundo”) must have written, survive only in fragments, preserved by the later historians and geographers.

[Footnote 1:  I have elsewhere disposed of the alleged allusions of Sanchoniathon to an island which was obviously meant for Ceylon. (See Note (A) end of this chapter.) The authenticity of the treatise De Mundo, as a production of ARISTOTLE, is somewhat doubtful (SCHOELL, Literat.  Grecque, liv. iv. c. xl.); and it might add to the suspicion of its being a modern composition, that Aristotle should do no more than mention the name and size of a country of which Onesicritus and Nearchus had just brought home accounts so surprising; and that he should speak of it with confidence as an island; although the question of its insularity remained somewhat uncertain at a much later period.]

[Footnote 2:  Fabricius, in the supplemental volume of his Codex Pseudepigraphi veteris Testamenti, Hamb., A.D. 1723, says:  “Samarita, Genesis, viii. 4, tradit Noae arcam requievisse super montem [Greek:  tes] Serendib sive Zeylan.”—­P. 30; and it was possibly upon this authority that it has been stated in Kitto’s Cyclopoedia of Biblical Literature, vol. i. p. 199, as “a curious circumstance that in Genesis, viii. 4, the Samaritan Pentateuch has Sarandib, the Arabic name of Ceylon,” instead of Ararat, as the resting place of the ark.  Were this true, it would give a triumph to speculation, and serve by a single but irresistible proof to dissipate doubt, if there were any, as to the early intercourse between the Hebrews and that island as the country from which Solomon drew his triennial supplies of ivory, apes, and peacocks (1 Kings, x. 22).  Assuming the correctness of the opinion that the Samaritan Pentateuch is as old as the separation of the tribes in the reign of Rehoboam, B. C. 975-958, this would not only furnish a notice of Ceylon far anterior to any existing authority; but would assign an antiquity irreconcilable with historical evidence as to its comparatively modern name of “Serendib.”  The interest of the discovery would still be extraordinary, even if the Samaritan Pentateuch be referred to the later date assigned to it by Frankel, who adduces evidence to show that its writer had made use of the Septuagint.  The author of the article in the Biblical Cyclopoedia is however in error.  Every copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch, both those printed in the Paris Polyglot and in that of Walton, as well as the five MSS. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which contain the eighth chapter of Genesis, together with several collations of the Hebrew and Samaritan text, make no mention of Sarandib, but all exhibit the word “Ararat” in its proper place in the eighth chapter of Genesis.  “Ararat” is also found correctly in BLAYNET’S Pentat, Hebroeo-Samarit., Oxford, 1790.