The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 / Page 271 (Color Image)

0271	The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1

POLO'S INFLUENCE ON GEOGRAPHY

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Squire's Tale from these old accounts of Tartary, and especially

from Marco Polo, because he has been so well edited by Colonel

Yule, there is very little probability that Chaucer consulted any

of them. It is much more likely that he found these details

where he found more important parts of his story, i.e. in some

lost romance. But if we must suppose that he provided his

own local colour, we have no right to pin him down to using

Marco Polo to the exclusion of other accessible authorities."

Mr. Pollard adds in a note (p. xiii.) : " There are some features

in these narratives, e.g. the account of the gorgeous dresses worn

at the Kaan's feast, which Chaucer with his love of colour could

hardly have helped reproducing if he had known them." H. C.]

XIII. NATURE OF POLO'S INFLUENCE ON GEOGRAPHICA I

KNOWLEDGE.

79. Marco Polo contributed such a vast amount of new

facts to the knowledge of the Earth's surface, that Tardy opera

one might have expected his book to have had a tion, and

causes

sudden effect upon the Science of Geography : but thereof.

no such result occurred speedily, nor was its beneficial effect

of any long duration.

No doubt several causes contributed to the slowness of its

action upon the notions of Cosmographers, of which the unreal

character attributed to the Book, as a collection of romantic

marvels rather than of geographical and historical facts, may

have been one, as Santarem urges. But the essential causes

were no doubt the imperfect nature of publication before the

invention of the press ; the traditional character which clogged

geography as well as all other branches of knowledge in the

Middle Ages ; and the entire absence of scientific principle in

what passed for geography, so that there was no organ com-

petent to the assimilation of a large mass of new knowledge.

Of the action of the first cause no examples can be more

striking than we find in the false conception of the Caspian

as a gulf of the Ocean, entertained by Strabo, and the opposite

error in regard to the Indian Sea held by Ptolemy, who regards

it as an enclosed basin, when we contrast these with the correct

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