HOW THE EARTH WAS REGARDED. 



549 



habitable, on the one side from excessive heat and on the other from 

 excessive cold. " The habitable world was thus much longer from 

 east to west than it was broad from north to south : whence come our 

 terms longitude, whose degrees are counted in the former direction, 

 and latitude, reckoned in the latter direction." 



In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of the Christian era sci- 

 ence made little progress in any direction, and, in regard to the ideas 

 of the earth, the fathers of the Church contented themselves with 

 pouring out their invective upon the idea that it is a globe, employ- 

 ing Scriptural reasons, which continued to be used even in the fifteenth 

 century by the monks of Salamanca. In the year a. d. 535, Cosmas, 

 surnamed Indicopleustes, after his voyage to India, wrote a work en- 

 titled " Christian Topography," in which he propounded the system 

 of a square earth, with solid walls for supporting the heavens. He 

 undertook to bring the opinions of the fathers into a methodical 



Fig. 10. The Earth and Firmament. 



shape, and to explain the heavens and the earth in accordance with 

 Scripture. We quote M. Flammarion's description of his system : 



" According to Cosmas and his map of the world, the habitable earth is a 

 plane surface. But, instead of being supposed, as in the time of Thales, to be 

 a disk, he represented it in the form of a parallelogram, whose long sides are 

 twice the shorter ones, so that man is on the earth like a bird in a cage. This 

 parallelogram is surrounded by the ocean, which breaks in in four great gulfs, 

 namely, the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas, and the Persian and Arabian 

 Gulfs. 



" Beyond the ocean in every direction there exists another continent, which 

 cannot be reached by man, but of which one part was once inhabited by him 

 before the deluge. To the last, just as in other maps of the world and in later 

 systems, he placed the Terrestrial Paradise and the four rivers that watered 

 Eden, which come by subterranean channels to water the post-diluvian earth. 



