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distance it is true, but one which a sailing vessel may take a long time in covering, since in these sheltered waters navigation is not aided by the constant winds of the monsoon. When every allowance has been made, however, it must be confessed that Marco Polo's journey from China to Sumatra occupied a prodigious time.

When, therefore, Sumatra was at last reached the force of the northeast monsoon was spent, and Marco Polo and his comrades had to make up their minds to a five months' stay upon the island while they awaited the return of a favourable wind.

Concerning the lands of southeastern Asia he has no very illuminating information to supply. Champa, or Chamba, was to him remarkable chiefly because it was a "very rich region, having a King of its own," whose children numbered 326 souls! He notes the vast quantity of tame elephants in use in this country, the "abundance" of lignaloes, and the existence of extensive forests of a jet-black timber, called bonús, but his account of Kublai Kaan's attempts to subdue the country is startlingly inaccurate. His description of Java—not "Java the Less," but the smaller and richer island over which the Dutch flag flies to-day—is hardly more exact, and it is plain that, lying as it does far from the highway between China and the West, he never personally visited it. He greatly overestimates its size, mentions that its king had no over-lord, and credits it with many vegetable products which it does not produce, the fact being that Java was at this period the great emporium of the trade of the Malayan Archipelago, the produce of the islands