command of the good things of the world, but above all of his
matchless opportunities of sport![5]

[Illustration: PROBABLE VIEW OF MARCO POLO'S OWN GEOGRAPHY]

Of humour there are hardly any signs in his Book. His almost solitary joke
(I know but one more, and it pertains to the [Greek: ouk anaekonta])
occurs in speaking of the Kaan's paper-money when he observes that Kublai
might be said to have the true Philosopher's Stone, for he made his money
at pleasure out of the bark of Trees.[6] Even the oddest eccentricities of
outlandish tribes scarcely seem to disturb his gravity; as when he relates
in his brief way of the people called Gold-Teeth on the frontier of Burma,
that ludicrous custom which Mr. Tylor has so well illustrated under the
name of the _Couvade_. There is more savour of laughter in the few lines
of a Greek Epic, which relate precisely the same custom of a people on the
Euxine:--

--"In the Tibarenian Land
When some good woman bears her lord a babe,
'Tis _he_ is swathed and groaning put to bed;
Whilst _she_, arising, tends his baths, and serves
Nice possets for her husband in the straw."[7]

[Sidenote: Absence of scientific notions.]

69. Of scientific notions, such as we find in the unveracious Maundevile,
we have no trace in truthful Marco. The former, "lying with a
circumstance," tells us boldly that he was in 33 deg. of South Latitude; the
latter is full of wonder that some of the Indian Islands where he had been
lay so far to the south that you lost sight of the Pole-star. When it
rises again on his horizon he estimates the Latitude by the Pole-star's
being so many _cubits_ high. So the gallant Baber speaks of the sun having
mounted _spear-high_ when the onset of battle began at Paniput. Such
expressions convey no notion at all to such as have had their ideas
sophisticated by angular perceptions of altitude, but similar expressions
are common among Orientals,[8] and indeed I have heard them from educated
Englishmen. In another place Marco states regarding certain islands in the
Northern Ocean that they lie so very far to the north that in going
thither one actually leaves the Pole-star a trifle behind towards the
south; a statement to which we know only one parallel, to wit, in the
voyage of that adventurous Dutch skipper who told Master Moxon, King
Charles II.'s Hydrographer, that he had sailed two degrees beyond the
Pole!

[Sidenote: Map constructed on Polo's data.