Mirabilia descripta - The wonders of the East

The little work here presented was printed in the original Latin at Paris in 1839, under the editorship of M. Coquebert-Montbret, in the Recueil de Voyages et de Mémoires, publié par la Société de Géographie, vol. iv. One must notice the frequent extraordinary coincidences of statement, and almost of expression, between this and other travellers of the same age, especially M. Polo. At first one would think that Jordanus had Polo’s book. But he certainly had not Ibn Batuta’s, and the coincidences with him are sometimes almost as striking. Had those ancient worthies, then, a Murray from whom they pilfered experiences, as modern travellers do? I think they had; but their Murray lay in the traditional yarns of[xviii] the Arab sailors with whom they voyaged, some of which seem to have been handed down steadily from the time of Ptolemy—peradventure of Herodotus almost to our own day.