"open your eyes."]

Lower down, there is a strange name, that has led to some stranger
mistakes; it is LAMA, or LAME DE SYLLA, written HAME DE SILLE on another
of these maps. It is a curious jumble that I have not been able to
decipher; it occurs close to the mouth of the Swan River of modern
charts.

Later French and Dutch map-makers took it for the name of an island in
that locality.

Now, in those days, navigators and geographers were constantly in search
of certain more or less fictitious islands, among which, the "Island of
Men" and the "Island of Women," had been sought for in vain.

Could this be one of the lost islands? The old-fashioned letter s,
resembling an f, made _Hame de sille_ look like _Hame de fille_, and a
French geographer jumped at the conclusion that the word was _fille_, and
that he had found the long lost island.

He called it accordingly _I. des Filles_,* Island of Girls. The Dutch
translated the name on their charts where a _Meisje Eylandt_ may be seen;
but, instead of the girls that they expected to see the island peopled
with, they found it overrun by beautiful creatures, it is true, but,
alas! of the small wallaby kind, peculiar to the outlying islands of
Western Australia.

[* See Vangondy's map of Australia (1756).]

It goes without saying that they did not know of the term _wallaby_, and