so acquainted
with Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra, and they were the first people to
learn the various uses to which the cocoa-nut can be put. Their
merchants, too, visited China as early as the ninth century, and we
have from their accounts some of the earliest descriptions of the
Chinese, who were described by them as a handsome people, superior
in beauty to the Indians, with fine dark hair, regular features,
and very like the Arabs. We shall see later on how comparatively
easy it was for a Mohammedan to travel from one end of the known
world to the other, owing to the community of religion throughout
such a vast area.

Some words should perhaps be said on the geographical works of the
Arabs. One of the most important of these, by Yacut, is in the form
of a huge Gazetteer, arranged in alphabetical order; but the greatest
geographical work of the Arabs is by EDRISI, geographer to King Roger
of Sicily, 1154, who describes the world somewhat after the manner
of Ptolemy, but with modifications of some interest. He divides the
world into seven horizontal strips, known as "climates," and ranging
from the equator to the British Isles. These strips are subdivided
into eleven sections, so that the world, in Edrisi's conception,
is like a chess-board, divided into seventy-seven squares, and his
work consists of an elaborate description of each of these squares
taken one by one, each climate being worked through regularly, so
that you might get parts of France in the eighth and ninth squares,
and other parts in the sixteenth and seventeenth. Such a method
was not adapted to give a clear conception of separate countries,
but this was scarcely Edrisi's object. When the Arabs--or, indeed,
any of the ancient or mediaeval writers--wanted wanted to describe
a land, they wrote about the tribe or nation inhabiting it, and
not about the position of the towns in it; in other words, they
drew a marked distinction between ethnology and geography.

[Illustration: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO IBN HAUKAL.]

But the geography of the Arabs had little or no influence upon
that of Europe, which, so far as maps went, continued to be based
on fancy instead of fact almost up to the time of Columbus.

Meanwhile another movement had been going on during the eighth and
ninth centuries, which helped to make Europe what it is, and extended
considerably the common knowledge of the northern European peoples.
For the first time since the disappearance of the Phoen