been unknown to the Greek and Roman geographers, whose information
or conjectures carried them no farther than Selan-dib or Ceylon, which
has claims to be considered as their Taprobane; although during the
middle ages that celebrated name was almost uniformly applied to Sumatra.
The single circumstance indeed of the latter being intersected by the
equator (as Taprobane was said to be) is sufficient to justify the doubts
of those who were disinclined to apply it to the former; and whether in
fact the obscure and contradictory descriptions given by Strabo,
Pomponius Mela, Pliny, and Ptolemy, belonged to any actual place, however
imperfectly known; or whether, observing that a number of rare and
valuable commodities were brought from an island or islands in the
supposed extremity of the East, they might have been led to give place in
their charts to one of vast extent, which should stand as the
representative of the whole, is a question not to be hastily decided.

OPHIR.

The idea of Sumatra being the country of Ophir, whither Solomon sent his
fleets for cargoes of gold and ivory, rather than to the coast of Sofala,
or other part of Africa, is too vague, and the subject wrapped in a veil
of too remote antiquity, to allow of satisfactory discussion; and I shall
only observe that no inference can be drawn from the name of Ophir found
in maps as belonging to a mountain in this island and to another in the
peninsula; these having been applied to them by European navigators, and
the word being unknown to the natives.

Until the discovery of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope the
identity of this island as described or alluded to by writers is often
equivocal, or to be inferred only from corresponding circumstances.

ARABIAN TRAVELLERS.

The first of the two Arabian travellers of the ninth century, the account
of whose voyages to India and China was translated by Renaudot from a
manuscript written about the year 1173, speaks of a large island called
Ramni, in the track between Sarandib and Sin (or China), that from the
similarity of productions has been generally supposed to mean Sumatra;
and this probability is strengthened by a circumstance I believe not
hitherto noticed by commentators. It is said to divide the Sea of
Herkend, or Indian Ocean, from the Sea of Shelahet) Salahet in Edrisi),
and Salat being the Malayan term both for a strait in general, and for
the well-known passage within the island of Singapura