as a translation of the other, but the discrepancies are not inconsistent, and would countenance the conjecture that the book is the production of one and the same person.  Much of the material is borrowed from PTOLEMY and PLINY but the facts which are new could only have been collected by persons who had visited the scenes they describe.  The compiler says he had learned from a certain scholar of Thebes that the inhabitants of Ceylon were called Macrobii, because, owing to the salubrity of the climate, the average duration of life was 150 years.  The petty kings of the country acknowledged one paramount sovereign to whom they were subject as satraps; this the Theban was told by others, as he himself not allowed to visit the interior.  A thousand other islands lie adjacent to Ceylon, and in a group of these which he calls Maniolae (probably the Attols of the Maldives,) is found the loadstone, which attracts iron, so that a vessel coming within its influence, is seized and forcibly detained, and for this reason the ships which navigate these seas are fastened with pegs of wood instead of bolts of iron.

Ceylon, according to this traveller, has five large and navigable rivers, it rejoices in one perennial harvest, and the flowers and the ripe fruit hang together on the same branch.  There are palm trees; both those that bear the great Indian nut, and the smaller aromatic one (the areka).  The natives subsist on milk, rice, and fruit.  The sheep produce no wool, but have long and silky hair, and linen being unknown, the inhabitants clothe themselves in skins, which are far from inelegantly worked.

Finding some Indian merchants there who had come in a small vessel to trade, the Theban attempted to go into the interior, and succeeded in getting sight of a tribe whom he calls Besadae or Vesadae, his description of whom is in singular conformity with the actual condition of the Veddahs in Ceylon at the present day.  “They are,” he says, “a feeble and diminutive race, dwelling in caves under the rocks, and early accustomed to ascend precipices, with which their country abounds, in order to gather pepper from the climbing plants.  They are of low stature, with large heads and shaggy uncut hair.”

The Theban proceeds to relate that being arrested by one of the chiefs, on the charge of having entered his territory without permission, he was forcibly detained there for six years, subsisting on a measure of food, issued to him daily by the royal authority.  This again presents a curious coincidence with the detention and treatment of Knox and other captives by the kings of Kandy in modern times.  He was at last released owing to the breaking out of hostilities between the chief who held him prisoner and another prince, who accused the former before the supreme sovereign of having unlawfully detained a Roman citizen, after which he was set at liberty, out of respect to the Roman name and authority.

This curious tract was first published by CAMERABIUS, but in 1665 Sir EDWARD BISSE, Baronet, and Clarenceux King-at-Arms, reproduced the Greek original, supposing it to be an unpublished manuscript, with a Latin translation.  It is incorporated in one of the MSS. of the Pseudo-Callisthenes recently edited by MUELLER, lib. iii. ch. vii. viii.; DIDOT. Script Groec.  Bib., vol. xxvi.  Paris, 1846.]