170 Transactions .—Miscellaneous . 



living science. Abulfeda quotes no less than sixty geo- 

 graphical authors, many of whom lived in the thirteenth 

 century. 



In European countries the knowledge of geographical 

 facts was limited to a few who were held fast in the chains of 

 theology ; and for centuries after the fall of Constantinople the 

 darkness of the "dark ages" engendered strange and erroneous 

 conceptions, which were only dissipated when, with the inven- 

 tion of printing, science once more lifted her head in Europe. 

 The early Fathers of the Church — the autocrats of learning in 

 those days — imagined that they had detected certain discre- 

 pancies between the discoveries of science and the words of 

 holy writ. The particular point on which their suspicion 

 fastened was the existence of the Antipodes. It was as- 

 sumed that no communication was possible, or ever had 

 been possible, between the Northern Hemisphere and any 

 southern part of the globe. Even if other continents existed, 

 they were supposed to be cut oft' from the European or Asian 

 lands by an ocean lying under the tropical zone, of insupport- 

 able heat, and therefore impassable. On this assumption it 

 was impossible that a population could have been derived 

 from the stock of x\dam, and consequently the whole theory 

 of its existence was opposed to the language of holy writ, 

 which througliout assumes that God hath made of one blood 

 all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth 

 (Acts, xvii., 26). 



Lactantius, in the fourth century, was so carried away by 

 his zeal for what he believed to be the truth that he im- 

 pugned the theory of the sphericity of the earth, and denied 

 it as a physical impossibility.'' 



St. Augustine, while equally determined in his rejection 

 of the Antipodes, is more cautious in the statement of his 

 reasons. He argues that, even if the world is spherical, it 

 does not follow that there should be land on the opposite 

 side of it ; and, even if there be land, it does not follow 

 that it should be inhabited — nay, inasmuch as none could 

 cross from this side to that, it must needs be uninhabited. t 

 Geography was henceforth forced into a mould of a pseu- 

 do-orthodoxy, and both map-makers and writers were dis- 

 couraged and fell into a narrow groove until they were 

 forced out of it by the gloiious discoveries of the fifteenth 

 and sixteenth centuries. The tenacity with which the 

 Patristic doctrines were maintained was exhibited in the 

 treatment which Columbus received. His proposal to cir- 

 cumnavigate the world was referred to a council of divines 

 in Salamanca, who pronounced it to be not only chimerical, 



* Instit., iii., 24. t De Civ. Dei., xvi., 9. 



