452 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Anglo-Saxon tract, giving science the form of a dialogue, occur 

 the following question and answer : " Why is the sun so red in 

 the evening ? " " Because he looketh down upon hell." 



But the ancient germ of scientific truth in geography still 

 lived, and a hundred years after Cosmas it gets new life from a 

 great churchman of southern Europe, Isidore of Seville, who, 

 however fettered by the dominant theology in many other things, 

 braved it in this. In the eighth century a similar declaration is 

 made in the north of Europe by another great church authority, 

 Bede. Against the new life thus given to the old truth, the sacred 

 theory struggled long and vigorously but in vain. Eminent 

 authorities in later ages, like Albert the Great, St. Thomas 

 Aquinas, Dante, and Vincent of Beauvais, felt obliged to accept 

 the doctrine of the earth's sphericity, and as we approach the 

 modern period we find its truth acknowledged by the vast 

 majority of thinking men.* 



2. The Delineation of the Earth. Every great people of 

 antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy 

 place as necessarily the center of the earth. 



The Chaldeans held that their " holy house of the gods " was 

 the center. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of 

 a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the center of 

 it, Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon ; for the Hindoos, 

 it was Mount Meru ; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized world 

 was concerned, Olympus or the temple at Delphi ; for the modern 

 Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone ; the Chinese, to 

 this day, speak of their empire as the "middle kingdom." It 

 was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human 

 thought that the Jews believed the center of the world to be 

 Jerusalem. 



The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of 

 the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy 

 city. Throughout the "ages of faith" this was very generally 

 accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding 

 the earth's form. St. Jerome, the greatest authority of the early 

 Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance 

 of the prophet, that Jerusalem must stand at the earth's center ; 

 in the ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated the 

 same argument ; in the eleventh century, Hugh of St. Victor gave 

 to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration ; and Pope Ur- 

 ban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the 

 crusade, declared, " Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth " ; 



* For a discussion of the geographical views of Isidore and Bede, see Santarem, Cosmo- 

 graphie, vol. i, pp. 22-24. For the gradual acceptance of the idea of the earth's sphericity 

 after the eighth century, see Kretschmer, pp. 51 et seq., where citations from a multitude of 

 authors are given. 



