PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 39 



valued the old story of the creation of the world, and would never 

 believe that trite proposition, ' Ex nihilo nihil fit.'' 



Stith, the historian of Virginia, protests, however, against the 

 charge that Harriott had led his pupil Raleigh into atheism. "As 

 to this groundless Aspersion," he remarked, "the Truth of it, 

 perhaps, was that Sir Walter and Mr. Harriott were the first who 

 ventured to depart from the beaten Tract of the Schools, and to 

 throw oft' and combat some hoary Follies and traditionary Errors 

 which had been riveted by age, and rendered sacred and inviolable 

 in the eyes of weak and prejudiced Persons. Sir Walter is said 

 to have been first led to this by the manifest Detection, from his 

 own Experience, of their erroneous Opinions concerning the 

 Torrid Zone, and he intended to have proceeded farther in the 

 Search after more Solid and important Truths 'till he was chid 

 and restrained by the Queen, into whom some Persons had infused 

 a Notion that such Doctrine was against God."* 



The erroneous opinions concerning the torrid zone which were 

 called in question by Harriott and Raleigh were based upon a 

 statement of Aristotle, in those days accepted as an article of faith, 

 that the equatorial zone of the earth was so scorched and dried by 

 the sun's heat as to be uninhabitable. Even the experience of 

 explorers was for many years overpowered by the weight of this 

 time-worn dogma. The Jesuit, Acosta, was accused of atheism 

 on the same grounds, by his Spanish contemporaries, but he re- 

 joiced that he had seen for himself, and that the climate under the 

 equator was so different from what he had expected that " he 

 could but laugh at Aristotle's meteors and his philosophy." 



Harriott's "Brief and True Report of the New Found Land 

 of Virginia," a thin volume in quarto, printed at Frankfort-on- 

 the-Main in 1590, f is now one of the rarest and most precious 



* Stith : History of Virginia, p 20. 



1 1590. HARIOT (or Harriott) , THOMAS. A briefe and true report | of 

 the new found land of Virginia | of the commodities and of the nature and 

 man | ners of the naturall inhabitants. Discouered by the English Col- 



