bound for Chaldea would have to run up the Straits of Hormuz to the mouths of the Euphrates" in order to reach the Celestial Empire, thus disposing once for all of Ptolemy's theory of a great southern continent enclosing the Indian Ocean upon which the land of the Sinæ, or southern Chinese, was formerly supposed to be situated. Cosmas, too, as Yule remarks, "was the earliest writer to speak of China in a matter-of-fact way, and not as a country enveloped in a half-mythical haze." In his work, therefore, we find the first written record of an appreciation on the part of a European of the true relative positions of China and of the lands of south-eastern Asia. The advance in knowledge thus indicated is not great, but it is considerably ahead of that possessed by Ptolemy, and for the sake of the truth which he was the earliest to disseminate we may forgive Cosmas the monk the farrago of nonsense with which he surrounded it, and also much of his bigotry and rage.
Meanwhile inter-Asiatic intercourse by means of the sea-routes had been steadily on the increase. It was the energy and the enterprise of Hippalus, a Greek,—or so we are led to believe by the classical writers who are on this point our only authorities—which showed the way to the Arabs and the Persians across the Indian Ocean, but during the centuries which followed upon his discovery, though an immense trade was in the hands of the merchants of Alexandria, the greatest sea-power in this quarter of the world, after the decline of the Roman Empire, was that of the Persians. As early as the middle of the second century the Romans had es-
