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native sources of no great accuracy. Hamilton may be regarded as typical of his class and age, and a study of his work shows us how slow was the progress of know- ledge of these regions after the great discoveries of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries. The missionaries, as ever, were ubiquitous and scornful of risk, but they were for the most part inarticulate for us, and when in 1821 John Crawfurd was sent to Bangkok and Hue on a special embassy, George Finlayson, in his account of the mission, writes of these countries as though they were in some sort being rediscovered. Hitherto, he declares, they had been "almost unknown to us." Craw- furd and his party were coldly received in Siam, and after a short stay at the capital they coasted as far as Pulau Kondor, touching at several islands on the way. They visited Saigon, where they met a M. Diard, "a lively, well-educated Frenchman," and passed thence to Hue by water after calling in at Turon. At the Court of Cochin- China they found that French influence was predominant, but permission to trade was granted by the King to the East India Company, and the mission then returned over- land to Turon. Five years later Burney, afterwards Resident at Ava, was sent to Bangkok to enlist the co- operation of the Siamese against Burma, with which the British were then at war, but he was not too well received, and the peace of Yandabu was concluded before any active steps had been taken. We have now traced the history of European intercourse with Siam up to the time of the first Burmese war, and as the detailed exploration of the country is a work that belongs to the last seventy