orence
compromises the dispute by designating Sumatra _Taprobane Major_. The
controversy came to an end at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
when the overpowering authority of DELISLE resolved the doubt, and
confirmed the modern Ceylon as the Taprobane of antiquity. WILFORD, in
the _Asiatic Researches_ (vol. x. p. 140), still clung to the opposite
opinion, and KANT undertook to prove that Taprobane was Madagascar.]

_Latitude and Longitude_.--There has hitherto been considerable
uncertainty as to the position assigned to Ceylon in the various maps
and geographical notices of the island: these have been corrected by
more recent observations, and its true place has been ascertained to be
between 5 deg. 55' and 9 deg. 51' north latitude, and 79 deg. 41' 40" and
81 deg. 54' 50" east longitude. Its extreme length from north to south,
from Point Palmyra to Dondera Head, is 271-1/2 miles; its greatest width
137-1/2 miles, from Colombo on the west coast to Sangemankande on the
east; and its area, including its dependent islands, 25,742 miles, or
about one-sixth smaller than Ireland.[1]

[Footnote 1: Down to a very recent period no British colony was more
imperfectly surveyed and mapped than Ceylon; but since the recent
publication by Arrowsmith of the great map by General Fraser, the
reproach has been withdrawn, and no dependency of the Crown is more
richly provided in this particular. In the map of Schneider, the
Government engineer in 1813, two-thirds of the Kandyan Kingdom are a
blank; and in that of the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge,
re-published so late as 1852, the rich districts of Neuera-kalawa and
the Wanny, in which there are innumerable villages (and scarcely a
hill), are marked as "_unknown mountainous region_." General Fraser,
after the devotion of a lifetime to the labour, has produced a survey
which, in extent and minuteness of detail, stands unrivalled. In this
great work he had the co-operation of Major Skinner and of Captain
Gallwey, and to these two gentlemen the public are indebted for the
greater portion of the field-work and the trigonometrical operations. To
judge of the difficulties which beset such an undertaking, it must be
borne in mind that till very recently travelling in the interior of
Ceylon was all but impracticable, in a country unopened even by bridle
roads, across unbridged rivers, over mountains never trod by the foot of
a European, and amidst precipices inaccessible to all