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China to Malabar without saying a single word concerning the places at which he touched upon the way, may be supposed capable of passing through the Straits of Malacca, or even through those of Sunda, on his way from Saba to India, without making any particular mention of the fact.

With Friar John and his mysterious island we take leave of the portion of our enquiry in which from the outset we have found ourselves groping through a fog of doubt and of conjecture. We have noted the frequency with which the sea-route to China was used by men of numerous races from very early times, and the comparatively exact information concerning the Far East which from time to time was brought home by wanderers returning to the West. It is, therefore, a matter of considerable surprise to find that when these regions were rediscovered by the Portuguese and Spaniards in the sixteenth century they were regarded by the whole of Europe as worlds undreamed of. The scant knowledge possessed by the ancients of India extra Gangem and of the Chersonesus Aurea had been practically forgotten; the more accurate and detailed information supplied by Marco Polo and his successors had been dismissed as incredible, or had been scorned as the purest inventions born of unruly or disordered imaginations; the immense force of Islâm had reared a wall between Europe and Asia which for a long period the former was powerless to scale. Even the Book of Messer Marco himself had come to be regarded as a piece of mere fiction, and accordingly by the time the first Portuguese vessels made