NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 58 1 



which it is founded; the text from the Psalms and the ex- 

 plicit declaration of St. Paul to the Romans, " Their sound went 

 into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world." 

 D'Ailly attempts to reason, but he is overawed, and gives to the 

 world virtually nothing. 



Still, the doctrine of the antipodes lived and moved : so much 

 so, that the eminent Spanish theologian Tostatus, even as late as 

 the age of Columbus, feels called upon to protest against it as 

 " unsafe." He has shaped the old missile of St. Augustine into 

 the following syllogism : " The apostles were commanded to go 

 into all the world and to preach the gospel to every creature ; they 

 did not go to any such part of the world as the antipodes ; they 

 did not preach to any creatures there ; ergo, no antipodes exist." 



The warfare of Columbus the world knows well how the 

 Bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal ; how sundry wise men of 

 Spain confronted him with the usual quotations from the Psalms, 

 from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine ; how, even after he was 

 triumphant, and after his voyage had greatly strengthened the 

 theory of the earth's sphericity, with which the theory of antip- 

 odes was so closely connected, the Church by its highest author- 

 ity solemnly stumbled and persisted in going astray. In 1493 

 Pope Alexander VI, having been appealed to as an umpire be- 

 tween the claims of Spain and Portugal to the newly discovered 

 parts of the earth, issued a bull laying down upon the earth's sur- 

 face a line of demarkation between the two powers. This line was 

 drawn from north to south a hundred leagues west of the Azores ; 

 and the Pope in the plenitude of his knowledge declared that all 

 lands discovered east of this line should belong to the Portuguese 

 and all west of it should belong to the Spaniards. This was 

 hailed as an exercise of divinely illuminated power by the Church ; 

 but difficulties arose, and in 1506 another attempt was made by 

 Pope Julius II to draw the line three hundred and seventy 

 leagues west of the Cape Verd Islands. This, again, was sup- 

 posed to bring divine wisdom to settle the question, but shortly 

 overwhelming difficulties arose; for the Portuguese claimed 

 Brazil, and, of course, had no difficulty in showing that they could 

 reach it by sailing to the east of the line, provided they sailed long 

 enough. The lines laid down by Popes Alexander and Julius may 

 still be found upon the maps of the period, but their bulls have 

 quietly passed into the catalogue of ludicrous errors. 



Yet the theological barriers to this geographical truth yielded 

 but slowly. Plain as it had become to scholars, they hesitated 

 to declare it to the world at large. Eleven hundred years had 

 passed since St. Augustine had proved its antagonism to Scripture, 

 when Gregory Reysch gave forth his famous encyclopaedia, the 

 Margarita Philosophica. Edition after edition was issued, and 



