ment, to divert him from doing damage to the ship. In the "Cosmography there is the picture of a ship to which a whale is approaching somewhat too closely for the nerves of the crew, and they are, therefore, represented as throwing A monster of the deep. 39 a tub overboard for it to play with. Neither the substitution of elephants for towns nor the notion of the ship-preserving tub are, however, the exclusive copyright of the Munster limners. The former are seen in various other old maps and the tub incident is introduced into the "Ship of Fools" and other old books. The great value of these monsters, terrestrial or marine, in filling up bare spaces, and in giving an additional interest and reality, may be very well seen in the accompanying illustration (fig. 2) -a view of the Azores, where the strange watermonster fills up very adequately indeed a space where Nature failed to deposit an island. It is impossible to decide its species; at first sight it suggests the notion of a sawfish or water-unicorn. The old draughtsman was unwilling that any of it should be lost to us, so instead of placing it in the water, it, with perhaps the exception of the missing lower jaw, is entirely on the surface. The mysterious something that crosses it suggests the idea that the creature is going bathing, and has thrown its towel, schoolboy-fashion, over its back; but on fuller reflection we take it that that is meant to indicate the wave and turmoil that the creature makes in the otherwise placid sea as it rushes through it, or rather over it. The figure is a facsimile of a drawing of a portion of the Azores, St. George and Flores being omitted by us. It is extracted from Sir Thomas Herbert's book, "Some Yeares Travels into Africa and Asia the Great, especially the famous Empires of Persia and Industant." The edition we consult was printed in London in the year 1677. After the usual dedicatory letter we find the following appeal to the reader :- "Here thou at greater ease than he He went for knowledge, and he got it. Who hath presented to thy sight Seas, Lands, Men, Beasts, Fishes, and Birds, Personally we have much pleasure in paying the suggested tribute of courteous thanks, and we think that any of our readers who may encounter the book will in like manner confess their obligations to the old writer for his labours. We would fain hope that the trip had many brighter spots in it than he seems quite willing to allow. It has been the custom with many writers to depreciate the labours of Marco Polo,* and to impute to him a lack of trustworthiness; but it appears to us, after a careful perusal of his book, that such censure is scarcely deserved. He made *His accounts were at the time considered so incredible, that the Venetians gave him the sobriquet of "Millioni," from the frequent recurrence of millions in his statements; and amongst other traducers Herbert says that "Geographers have filled their maps and globes with the names of Tenduc, Tangutt, Tamfur, Cando, Camul, and other hobgobling words obtruded upon the World by those three arrant Monks, Haython, Marc Parc the Venetian, and Vartoman, who fearing no imputations make strange discoveries as well as descriptions of places." This from the sea-monsterist of the Azores! The Travels of Marco Polo. 41 mistakes, but he is poles asunder from such writers as Maundevile or Pinto.* His travels in the east are narrated with much fidelity, and are almost entirely free from the gross misstatements that are met with so freely in many books of travel, not only at this early date but for centuries afterwards. The original was probably written in the Venetian dialect, but the earliest manuscript now known, that of 1320, is in Latin. A copy of this is in the magnificent library of the British Museum, another is in the Royal Berlin Library, another in the Paris Library, and some few others are in private collections. Other MSS. of it exist, and it was also freely printed on the advent of the printing press, as for instance, at Basle in 1522; in Venice in 1496, 1508, 1597, and 1611; in Brescia in 1500; Paris, 1556; Nuremberg, 1477; Strasburg, 1534; Leipzig, 1611; Lisbon, 1502; Seville, 1520; London, 1597, 1625; Amsterdam, 1664. As these various editions were in the languages of the respective places of publication it indicates a widespread interest, and it may be taken as a proof, too, that the book was held to possess solid value: no book of the Munchausen type can show such a record as * Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was a celebrated Portuguese navigator, who published a description of his travels of so marvellous a nature that his name became a synonym for extravagant fiction. We meet with him, for instance, in Congreve's play of "Love for Love," where the passage occurs: "Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude." this. An excellent English edition, very freely illustrated by notes, is that of William Marsden, published in 1818: to this the editor prefixes a very complete biography of the old author. : Master Peter Heylyn, geographer, who flourished during the reigns of Charles I., Cromwell, and Charles II., tells us of many marvellous journeys in his volume, and introduces much that is curious in his notes of the natural history of the countries visited. India was in those days an inscrutable and little-known land, where the wildest imagination had full play and was in but little danger of being dispossessed by cold reality. Wonderful, however, as the tales were that came to Heylyn's ears he found some of them almost beyond credit, and after telling us of "men with dogges heads of men with one legge onely, of such as live by sent; of men that had but one eye, and that in their foreheads ; and of others whose eares did reach unto the ground," he is careful to add "But of these relations and the rest of this straine I doubt not but the understanding reader knoweth how to judge and what to believe." He tells us, too, of an Indian people that by eating dragon's heart and liver attain to the understanding of the languages of beasts, who can make themselves, when they will, invisible, and who have "two tubbes, whereof the one opened yields winde, and the other raine," but here, too, he hesitates to take the responsibility of these tales and leaves their credence or rejection to the faith or scepticism of his readers. In the Moluccas, too, |