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striking manner the opportunities for travelling which in the early fourteenth century were open to any adventurous Muslim. Ibn Batuta, professional holy man, regarded his coreligionists as created for his comfort and convenience. Wherever he went he preyed upon them shamelessly, and deemed them sufficiently honoured by being suffered to minister to his needs, travelling in this fashion to the very ends of the then known earth. He managed things on a scale of unexampled magnificence, and it is our good fortune that he lived to tell his tale for our delight, but it is probable that he was only a preeminent member of a class, and that at this period there were numerous Muhammadans, with a curious taste in wives and a rapacious appetite for "rich presents," who wandered up and down the world and drew much profit from the ubiquity of the great religious fraternity established throughout the East by the Persian and Arabian merchants.

Ibn Batuta traversed the well-worn route to China, and has little enough to tell us concerning the lands of south-eastern Asia. He was duly impressed with the number of the king of Champa's children, and noted the multitude of tame elephants used in that country. He touched at some point in the Malay Peninsula, which he calls Mul-Java, or the mainland of Java, and he spent a season awaiting the change of the monsoon on the island of Sumatra. Here he was present at the marriage of the daughter of his host—the "king of Sumatra," as he calls him, though this potentate only ruled over a small portion of the island—and the account which he gives of the ceremony might have been written by an