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 consideration must be held to apply to the direction in which ships making the voyage to Cattigara are said to have sailed after passing the Golden Chersonese. The brief examination of Ptolemy's itinerary already attempted will suffice to establish the probability that Marinus's informant had actually travelled over the sea-route to southern China, and that the geographical confusions shown in the map of the world according to Ptolemy were due less to error in the information supplied than to the faulty reasoning occasioned by misconceptions on the part of the philosophers themselves.

Although, as we have seen, the earliest indication of any conception of lands lying far to the east and south of the valley of the Ganges on the part of the learned of the West belongs to the year 43, and the first mention of the Chersonesus Aurea occurs in the works of Marinus of Tyre about a century later, it would appear that the name which the latter was the first to attach to a definite locality had become familiarly known to savants in Europe at a somewhat earlier period. This came about, it is probable, through the accounts brought back by mariners who had themselves made the voyage to this distant quarter of the earth, of whom there is no particular reason to believe that Marinus's Alexander was the first. The name itself would be suggestive of great wealth; distance would lend to it its customary enchantment; the vague information current concerning it would serve to deck it with a halo of mystery, with the glamour of romance; whence it would naturally arise that the Golden Chersonese would come to be regarded