454 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dence that this had become precious truth to them, both in the- 

 ology and geography.* 



Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way 

 from our sacred writings into mediaeval map-making ; two others 

 were almost as marked. 



First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and Magog. 

 Few passages in the Old Testament are more sublime than the 

 denunciation of these great enemies by Ezekiel; and the well- 

 known statement in the Apocalypse fastened the Hebrew feeling 

 regarding them with a new meaning into the mind of the early 

 Church : hence it was that the mediaeval map-makers took great 

 pains to delineate these monsters and their habitations on the 

 maps. For centuries no map was considered orthodox which did 

 not show them. 



The second conception was derived from the frequent men- 

 tion in our sacred books of the " four winds." Hence came a 

 vivid belief in their real existence and their delineation on the 

 maps, generally as colossal heads with distended cheeks, blowing 

 vigorously toward Jerusalem. 



Even at a period after these conceptions had mainly disap- 

 peared we find here and there evidences of the difficulty men 

 found in giving up the scriptural idea of direct personal inter- 

 ference by agents of Heaven in the ordinary phenomena of Na- 

 ture : thus in a noted map of the sixteenth century representing 

 the earth as a sphere, there is at each pole a crank, with an angel 

 laboriously turning the earth by means of it. f 



* For the site of the cross on Calvary, as the point where stood " the tree of the knowledge 

 of good and evil " in Eden, at the center of the earth, see various Eastern travelers cited in 

 Tobler ; but especially the travels of Bishop Arculf in the Holy Land in Wright's Early 

 Travels in Palestine, p. 8 ; also, Travels of Saewulf, ibid., p. 38 ; also, Sir John Maundeville, 

 ibid., pp. 166, 167 ; and for one narrative in which the idea was developed into an amazing 

 mass of pious myths, see Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel, edited by Sir C. W. Wil- 

 son, London, 1885, p. 14. (The passage deserves to be quoted as an example of myth-mak- 

 ing ; it is as follows : " At the time of our Lord's crucifixion, when he gave up the ghost 

 on the cross, the veil of the temple was rent, and the rock above Adam's skull opened, and 

 the blood and water which flowed from Christ's side ran down through the fissure upon the 

 skull, thus washing away the sins of men.") 



f For Gog and Magog, see Ezekiel, chaps, xxxviii and xxxix, and Rev. xx, 8 ; and for the 

 general subject, Toy, Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 373, 374. For maps show- 

 ing these two great terrors, and for geographical discussion regarding them, see Lelewel, 

 Geog. du Moyen Age, Bruxelles, 1850, Atlas; also Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeck- 

 ungen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 78, 79 ; also Peschel's Abhandlungen, pp. 28-35, and Gesch. der Erd- 

 kunde, p. 210. For representations on maps of the "Four Winds," see Charton, Voyageurs, 

 tome ii, p. 11 ; also Ruge as above, pp. 324, 325 ; also, for a curious mixture of the 

 scriptural four winds with the classical winds issuing from the bags of ^Eolus, see a map 

 of the twelfth century in Leon Gautier, La Chevalerie, p. 153 ; and for maps showing addi- 

 tional winds, see various editions of Ptolemy. For a map with angels turning the earth by 

 means of cranks at the poles, see Grynaeus, Novus Orbis, Basilese, 1537. 



