n, &c. was adopted by Ptolemy, but he erroneously describes it
as if its greatest length was from east to west. The peninsula to which he
gives the name of the Golden Chersonesus, and which is probably Malacca, he
describes as stretching from north to south: to the east of it he places a
great bay, and in the most distant part of it the station of Catigara.
Beyond this, he asserts that the earth is utterly unknown, and that the
land bends from this to the west, till it joins the promontory of Prasum in
Africa, at which place this quarter of the world terminated to the south.
Hence it appears that he did not admit a communication between the Indian
and Atlantic oceans, and that he believed the Erythrean sea to be a vast
basin, entirely enclosed by the land.

Strabo and Pliny believed that Africa terminated under the torrid zone, and
that the Atlantic and Indian oceans joined. Ptolemy, as we have just seen,
rejected this idea, and following the opinion of Hipparchus, that the earth
was not surrounded by the ocean, but that the ocean was divided into large
basins, separated from each other by intervening land, maintained, that
while the eastern coast of Africa at Cape Prasum united with the coast of
Asia at the bay of the Golden Chersonesus, the western coast of Africa,
after forming a great gulf, which he named Hespericus, extended between the
east and south till it joined India. The promontory of Prasum was
undoubtedly the limit of Ptolemy's knowledge of the east coast of Africa:
the limit of his knowledge of the west coast is not so easily fixed: some
suppose that it did not reach beyond the river Nun; while others, with more
reason, extend it to the Gulf of St. Cyprian, because the Fortunate
Islands, which he assumed as his first meridian, will carry his knowledge
beyond the Nun; and because, at the Gulf of St. Cyprian, the coast turns
suddenly and abruptly to the east, in such a manner as may be supposed to
have led Ptolemy to believe that it stretched towards and joined the coast
of India.

Of some of the interior parts of Africa Ptolemy possessed clear and
accurate information; regarding others, he presents us with a mass of
confused notions. He clearly points out the Niger, though he fixes its
source in a wrong latitude. In the cities of Tucabath and Tagana, which he
places on its banks, may perhaps be recognized Tombuctoo and Gana. The most
striking defect in his geography of the interior of Africa is, that he does