Geographical LATrruDE. 757 



sixth parallel, ' altbough tbey knew that that was not exact.- Other 

 points whose latitude is given by Hipparchus are Athens, 36^; Alex- 

 andria in Troas, 41°; Byzantium aiul Massilia (Marseilles), 43°; Syra- 

 cuse, 30° 44'; mouth of the Xanthus in Lycia, also 36° 44'; and Baby- 

 lon, 33° 30'. One of the easy-going methods of the early geographers 

 was to bring as many places of importance as possible on the same 

 parallel, of which there are several lists.^ That this at best could 

 be only an a])proximation to the truth, and that opinions would neces- 

 sarily vary, is a matter of course. One well known case gives a strik- 

 ing example, viz : Strabo's rather sharp criticism of Hipparchus for 

 placing Byzantium on the same parallel with Massilia and then him- 

 self making the still greater error of placing the former to the north/ 

 while in reality it is more than 2 degrees farther south.'^ Hipparchus 

 dreamed of the possibility of fixing the locations of all places on the 

 surface of the earth by the use of a common standard, viz, that of lat- 

 itude and longitude, *' and did all in his power to show his successors 

 how to attain that possibility. But all were not willing to follow the 

 lines laid down by him, and even so good and late a geographer as 

 Strabo combated his theory, while not being able to propose a better 

 and in fact adopting in great part that which he condemned." First 

 at the hands of Mariuus of Tyre " and of Ptolemy ^ was made a prac- 

 tical application on a large scale of the ideas of Hipparchus, which 

 even now form the basis of our usage. 



Maps. — The use of maps dates from a very early period. Like first 

 essays in general they must have been very crude. In the first place 

 their makers had an extremely imperfect knowledge of the earth, and 

 what is not accurately known can not be pictorially well represented. 

 Moreover, there is an inherent difficulty iu the matter, owing to the 

 sphericity of the earth, whose form necessitates distortion of some sort 

 when represented on a flat surface. If drawn in perspective, as one 

 looking at the earth from some distant point in space would see it, the 

 portions toward the circumference of the resulting circle become falsely 

 curved and much too narrow for their length. If drawn according to 

 Mercator's projection, the meridians remain parallel instead of converg- 

 ing at the poles, and so give a false picture of the comparative breadth 

 of bodies of land and water at the equator and to the north and south. 

 fSo each jjossible kind of projection on a plane surface has its jieculiar 



1 PtolemsBus, Geographia, lib. i, cap. xx. 

 -Hiiyparcbus giive 3G° 20' (Berger's Hip., 72). 



=* Grosskurd'a Strabo, I. 219, 220, lib. ii. cap. iv. ^ 27. Forbiger's Strabo, lib i. cap. 

 . M- p. 100. 



•• Grossknrd's Strabo., i. 1889, lib. ii. cap. iv, ^ 8. 

 *Delambrc,p. 257, makes it a criticism of Pytheas. 

 <> Berger, Frag. d. Hipparch., 20,21. 

 'Bcrger's Hipparch., 44. 

 •Peschel, Gescli. d. Erdkunde, 51. 

 'Ptolemaeus, Geographia, lib. i, cap. xix. 



