[o'sniKx] CABOTS LANDFALL AND CHART 429 



Cabot must have considered Tanais north of Bristol, as it is so given 

 on Ptolemy's map. Hence, he concludes, the argument would tell 

 against myself. 



Dr. Dawson fears I underrate the general extent of knowledge of 

 mediaeval cartography. Well, if the authorities he cites in Appendix 

 E, and which he more than endorses, are specimen witnesses, his fears 

 are groundless. We had thought the day was passed, and with it the 

 strange hallucination that warped men's vision, when a writer could 

 suggest that the human mind had been stagnant for long centuries. 

 A noted English writer has tersely rebuked this mental attitude by 

 saying: — "Those who speak of the ignorance of the Middle Ages only 

 show their own ignorance of its achievements." I shall only add to this 

 that it is incomprehensible how men can think that the Ages which 

 studded Europe with the finest specimens of architecture, filled them with 

 the noblest Avorks of sculpture and paintings, adorned them with 

 exquisite taste and skill, both in mosaic and wood-carving, which pro- 

 duced the greatest poets, witness Dante, Petrarch, Tasso — the most pro- 

 foimd philosophers and theologians, such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas 

 Aquinas and a score of other schoolmen, learned writers and historians, 

 navigators like Columbus, the Cabots, Amerigo Vespucci, — were char- 

 acterized by mental stagnation. Dr. Dawson waxes mirthful over a 

 certain Cosmas Indicopleustis. I fear he will be obliged to hold his 

 sides (since he finds a case of not very inexcusable ignorance so amusing) 

 when he reads that an enlightened Englishman wrote, and a first class 

 English Quarterly published, a very few years before the introduction of 

 railways, that the idea of travelling on an iron road, by steam, at the 

 rate of ten miles an hour, was as absurd as the proposition to go from 

 the arsenal to Woolwich on a Congreve rocket. 



On account of the neglect of, or contempt for mediaeval literature, 

 human progress has lost at least a century. The solid foundations, 

 and many ffeet of shapely walls, of the temple of human knowledge 

 had been built by the Ancients and their successors of the Middle Ages. 

 Instead of continuing the work, men of these latter centuries started to 

 build anew. The many superficial, fanciful and shifting theories of 

 our day prove that the foundations of the new temple have been laid on 

 sand. 



That vague ideas of the whereabouts of Tanais existed, and still 

 exist, may be granted. But I shall prove that before, during and after 

 Cabot's time, the Venetians, Genoese, Milanese 'and Italians in general, 

 knew Tanais as a definitely located State or Country in Europe. Cer- 

 tainly as a distinct tribe the Tanaitœ of Ptolemy did not exist, but the 

 country remained and was known as Tana, though not always men- 



