“Rison” could scarcely have been other than the Pison of the Bible, spelled Phison in the Nuremberg MS. (_Penzel edition_, 123); this accounts for the statement that gold and precious stones were found in it, produce for which the territory of Khivila, watered by the Phison, was celebrated. Schiltberger adds, that the “Rison” traversed India, whilst he identifies the Indus with the Nile; his fourth river must therefore have been the Ganges, the Phison of Moses of Chorene, who states that the river was at the limits of the two peninsulas of India, although Haythoun, his countryman, believed the Phison to be the Oxus because it divided Persia into two parts: one containing Samarkand and Bokhara; the other, the southern cities of Nishapur, Ispahan, etc. Not satisfied with having reconciled the contradictory opinions of his predecessors, in identifying the Phison with the Ganges, Giovanni de’ Marignolli unites to these two rivers the Hoang-Ho and even the Volga (Raumer, _Palæstina_, etc., Appendix, vii), and he represents that, after irrigating Evilach in India, the Phison passes, not only into China, where it is called the Karamora (Kara-mouran—Black River—was the name given by the Mongols to the Yellow River of the Chinese), but after disappearing in the sands behind Caffa, again shews itself and forms the Sea of Bakou—Caspian—behind Chana—Tana, now Azoff. We are bound to admit that Schiltberger is nearer the truth in saying that he had never seen the “Rison” at all, than was the bishop of Bisignano who recognised it in too many rivers at one and the same time.—BRUUN.
(1.) “the city of Lambe, in a forest called Lambor.”—Pepper was cultivated in Malabar, the country indicated by these two names, long before Schiltberger’s time. Kazvini, who died in 1283, Aboulfeda and Ibn Batouta, all mention its produce, and Giovanni de’ Marignolli, who visited Malabar in 1348, describes the cultivation of pepper in pretty much the same terms as does our author, equally refuting the story that the black colour was owing to smoke employed to drive away serpents. We are informed by this author of the existence of many Christians of St. Thomas in the country, and that there was a Latin church dedicated to St. George in the town of Columbus, doubtlessly the Kollam of the Arabs (Peschel, _Gesch. d. Erdkunde_, 162, note 3), the Kuilon of the Chinese, called Coilum by Marco Polo, Chulam by Benjamin of Tudela, Kaalan by Haythoun, Palombo, Alembo, Polumbrum by Oderic and Mandevile, and Koulem by the natives. These names have nothing in common with Koulouri, where the Russian merchant Nikitin spent five months, but they somewhat assimilate that of Colanum taken in 1503 by the Portuguese, who stated that this town on the coast of Malabar was reputed to be the most ancient and the richest in India (Maffei, _Hist. Ind._, i, 52, xii, 289). Colanum may have been one of the places mentioned by Schiltberger, the other being Calicut, touched at by Vasco de Gama in 1498.