e of the
Ganges and the women on the other. The husbands visited their wives for 40
days only in June, July, and August, "those being their cold months, as the
sun was then to the north." And when a wife had once borne a child the
husband returned no more. (_Mueller's Ps. Callisth._ 105.) The Mahabharata
celebrates the Amazon country of Rana Paramita, where the regulations were
much as in Polo's islands, only male children were put to death, and men if
they overstayed a month. (_Wheelers India_, I. 400.)

Hiuen Tsang's version of the legend agrees with Marco's in placing the
Woman's Island to the south of Persia. It was called the _Kingdom of
Western Women_. There were none but women to be seen. It was under _Folin_
(the Byzantine Empire), and the ruler thereof sent husbands every year; if
boys were born, the law prohibited their being brought up. (_Vie et
Voyages_, p. 268.) Alexander, in Ferdusi's poem, visits the City of Women
on an island in the sea, where no man was allowed.

The Chinese accounts, dating from the 5th century, of a remote Eastern
Land called Fusang, which Neumann fancied to have been Mexico, mention
that to the east of that region again there was a Woman's Island, with the
usual particulars. (_Lassen_, IV. 751.) [Cf. _G. Schlegel, Niu Kouo,
T'oung Pao_, III. pp. 495-510.--H.C.] Oddly enough, Columbus heard the
same story of an island called Matityna or Matinino (apparently
Martinique) which he sighted on his second voyage. The Indians on board
"asserted that it had no inhabitants but women, who at a certain time of
the year were visited by the Cannibals (Caribs); if the children born were
boys they were brought up and sent to their fathers, if girls they were
retained by the mothers. They reported also that these women had certain
subterranean caverns in which they took refuge if any one went thither
except at the established season," etc. (_P. Martyr_ in _Ramusio_, III. 3
v. and see 85.) Similar Amazons are placed by Adam of Bremen on the Baltic
Shores, a story there supposed to have originated in a confusion between
Gwenland, i.e. Finland, and a land of _Cwens_ or Women.

Mendoza heard of the like in the vicinity of Japan (perhaps the real
Fusang story), though he opines judiciously that "this is very doubtful
to be beleeved, although I have bin certified by religious men that have
talked with persons that within these two yeares have beene at the saide
ilands, and have seene the saide women." (_H