It is very interesting to see that in the map of Africa[9] the Nile takes its rise from three large lakes far south of the equator, but the map of the world is an extraordinary production, and shows, sources of the Nile notwithstanding, a strange ignorance of elementary facts. The South Atlantic is almost entirely filled up from Brazil to Africa by a great sea monster. In the map of Africa a gigantic elephant is introduced, a proceeding that was rather popular with these older writers, and which is satirized in the well-known lines of Swift— “So geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o’er inhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns.” Even in the days of Plutarch a kindred device was not unknown, as we find him in the “Theseus” writing, “as geographers crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts and unapproachable bogs.” Elsewhere in this map of Africa we see trees with enormous parrots (miles long if we judge them by the general scale of the map) perched in their branches, and the reputed home of the monoculi, the one-eyed men, is indicated by the introduction of one of them. In South America in the same way the home of the Canibali is marked by a hut of tree trunks and branches from which hang suspended, as in a larder, a human leg and a man’s head. Many old beliefs obtain curious illustration, thus in one of the quaint pictures we see a man using the divining rod to detect subterranean water. That Swift knew the book seems probable from his happy allusion to the elephants in lieu of towns, and this probability grows almost into a certainty, when we read, in his “Tale of a Tub,” his assertion that sea-men have a custom, when they meet a whale, of flinging him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from doing damage to the ship. In the “Cosmography” there is the picture of a ship to which a whale is approaching somewhat too closely for the nerves of the crew, and they are, therefore, represented as throwing a tub overboard for it to play with. Neither the substitution of elephants for towns nor the notion of the ship-preserving tub are, however, the exclusive copyright of the Munster limners. The former are seen in various other old maps and the tub incident is introduced into the “Ship of Fools” and other old books.