The colonisation of Madagascar by the Malay tribes is a topic full of interest: but we know almost nothing about it. It is singular that in the very first mention made of the island, the celebrated notice of it by Marco Paolo, he should have made a strange mistake and mixed it with information which belongs to the Somali country around Cape Gardafui. Madagascar has neither elephants nor hippopotami; neither leopards nor bears nor lions. Nevertheless it is evident that the great traveller learned something real about the island, and of that aspect of it which was specially presented to the great sailors of his time, the Arab and Persian traders, whose fathers had visited it for many ages. Sandal wood is still exported from the northern ports; and the Hindus carry on “a profitable trade.” I do not think that the people whom Fra Mauro speaks of as blown away to the southward were connected with the original settling of Madagascar by the Malays: the accident he describes seems to me of much later date than that settlement; and that it happened to Indian traders who were sailing down the African coast. When they were blown back again, they may have seen shells of the Œpyornis, on the sandy terrace at the south-east end of Madagascar, where M. Grandidier found both shells and bones. Fra Mauro does not say that they saw the living birds. Sindbad’s additions about the elephants and the jewels are applications of “travellers’ tales” and traditions floating about the nautical world long before his day.