precisely as if Cosmas Indicopleustes, visiting Scotland in the sixth century, should have placed the scene of any adventure in a town distant six miles from Glasgow and eight miles from Edinburgh.  These we know to be irreconcilable conditions, such as cannot meet in any town whatever, past or present.  But in such a case many circumstances might, notwithstanding, combine to throw a current of very strong suspicion upon Hamilton as the town concerned.  On the same principle, it is easy to see that most of those Romans who spoke of Taprobane had Ceylon in their eye.  But that all had not, and of those who really had, that some indicated by their facts very different islands, whilst designing to indicate Ceylon, is undeniable; since, amongst other imaginary characteristics of Taprobane, they make it extend considerably to the south of the line.  Now, with respect to Ceylon, this is notoriously false; that island lies entirely in the northern tropic, and does not come within five (hardly more than six) degrees of the equator.  Plain it is, therefore, that Taprobane, it construed very strictly, is an ens rationis, made up by fanciful composition from various sources, and much like our own mediaeval conceit of Prester John’s country, or the fancies (which have but recently vanished) of the African river Niger, and the golden city Tombuctoo.  These were lies; and yet also, in a limited sense, they were truths.  They were expansions, often fabulous and impossible, engrafted upon some basis of fact by the credulity of the traveller, or subsequently by misconception of the scholar.  For instance, as to Tombuctoo, Leo Africanus had authorized men to believe in some vast African city, central to that great continent, and a focus to some mighty system of civilization.  Others, improving on that chimera, asserted, that this glorious city represented an inheritance derived from ancient Carthage; here, it was said, survived the arts and arms of that injured state; hither, across Bilidulgerid, had the children of Phoenicia fled from the wrath of Rome; and the mighty phantom of him whose uplifted truncheon had pointed its path to the carnage of Cannae, was still the tutelary genius watching over a vast posterity worthy of himself.  Here was a wilderness of lies; yet, after all, the lies were but so many voluminous fasciae, enveloping the mummy of an original truth.  Mungo Park came, and the city of Tombuctoo was shown to be a real existence.  Seeing was believing.  And yet, if, before the time of Park, you had avowed a belief in Tombuctoo, you would have made yourself an indorser of that huge forgery which had so long circulated through the forum of Europe, and, in fact, a party to the total fraud.