Hamilton. — On our Knoivledge of the Oceanic Areas. 169 



of the Carthaginians and Greeks. They were essentially a 

 warlike and practical people, with politicians, jurists, eucyclo- 

 ptedists, and historians, but few philosophers who occupied 

 themselves with the operations of nature. 



Horace's system of winds, several passages of Virgil on 

 meteorology, the statements concerning geological phenomena 

 in Ovid, and notices of diluvial action on the surface of the 

 globe in Vitruvius, all show a spirit of observation and in- 

 quiry ; but, generally speaking, if we deduct what the Romans 

 had received from the Greeks, there is little relating to ocean- 

 ography that can be regarded as original among the writings 

 of Latin authors. The military operations each occasioned a 

 new survey and a new itinerary, though it was not till the 

 reign of Caracalla that these itineraries were elaborated into 

 accurate topographical documents. 



As Vivien de St. Martin remarks, never was there such an 

 opportunity for a great work on descriptive geography as 

 during the re'gn of Augustus. The Roman rule then, spread 

 as it was over more than, half of the then known world, and 

 attached to the remainder by pohtical and commercial rela- 

 tions, created most propitious conditions for an undertaking of 

 this kind by furnishing to the geographer a ready means of 

 investigation., A man appeared to carry out the work for 

 which the time was ripe, but the man was a Greek — Strabo, 

 of Amaseia — who, in his seventeen books, has given us the 

 most important geographical work of antiquity. 



In the first century of our era was written the earliest 

 work or treatise devoted exclusively to geography. It was 

 written by Pomponius Mela," a native of Spain. In this 

 work we find the first notice of the opinion, so prevalent in 

 aftertimes, as to an impassable zone intervening between our 

 world and the alter orbis of the Antichthones in the temper- 

 ate zone of the Southern Hemisphere. Passing on to the last 

 great geographer of antiquity — Ptolemy — we find him devoting 

 two of his numerous works to geography, and improving the 

 ars delineandi and the tabidas geographicis ; and he is the first 

 to use the words "latitude " and "longitude " as purely technical 

 terms. From this point the progi'ess of geographical know- 

 ledge is carried on on two separate lines. The great outburst 

 of Mohammedan conquest was followed by an Arabian civilisa- 

 tion, which had its centres at Baghdad and Cordova. The 

 Arabs brought astronomy and mathematics to bear on its 

 problems, and established observatories. They measured an 

 arc of a great circle of the earth ; they studied Ptolemy ; they 

 applied themselves to define with accuracy the discoveries of 

 travellers ; and thus geography became in their hands a 



* De Situ Orbis. 



