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 world according to Masudi and Edrisi respectively, here reproduced from M. Reinaud's excellent edition of La Geographie d' Aboulféda. Masudi, who wrote during the first half of the tenth century and who was a contemporary of Abu Zaid Hassan, had not only travelled extensively, but was also well versed in the literature of his subject and had had access to older Arabic works which have since been lost to us. His book therefore represented the widest and soundest geographical knowledge of his time, yet a glance at the chart which puts his conception of the universe before us in a convenient form suffices to demonstrate how radical were many of his misconceptions concerning the form and nature of the earth's surface, and how great was his confusion in matters of detail. For him Indo-China and Malaya consisted of one lozenge-shaped peninsula to the south of which lay Sumatra in the same latitude as Ceylon, while Java was situated further to the eastward almost on the same parallel. China itself was also a peninsula, separated from that of Indo-China by a great gulf, while far to the south of all lay a vast terra incognita which had its beginning near the south of the Sudan.

Edrisi's chart is even more confusing, although its author who lived and wrote under King Roger II of Sicily, completed his work in 1153-54. He fills almost the whole of the southern hemisphere with the African continent, makes the Mediterranean occupy an altogether disproportionate space in the universe, vastly exaggerates the size of Sicily and of Ceylon, while to neither India nor China does he give the prominence which rightly