[s. B. DAWSON] THE LINES OF DEMARCATION 47S 



doctrine of the sphericity of the earth, as taught by the Greek geo- 

 graphers, was held by the greater minds within the Church and never 

 authoritatively rebuked. Herein is the essential unfairness of books like 

 President Andrew D. White's Warfare of Science. He holds the Roman 

 Church responsible for the sputterings of Cosmas Tndicopleustes. But 

 tha.t irritable religionist was not a churchman by training, and, although 

 in late life he became a monk in Egypt, he was a merchant, a traveller 

 and a sailor for the greater part of his life — he was never a priest. His 

 travels were extensive and his observations upon what he actually saw 

 were valuable ; but his Christian Topography was written in Greek, in 

 the time of Justinian. To make the Roman Church responsible for 

 his extravagances is not fair disputation. The belief in the sphericity 

 of the earth was by no means general in Greek and Roman times. The 

 Epicureans laughed at it as a vagary of Pythagoras, and those who, in 

 all ages, are called "common-sense people," did not believe it any more 

 than Cosmas,— though they might have been pagans. In Chapter VII. 

 of Plutarch's treatise, On the Apparent Face in the Moon's Orh, the 

 theory is ridiculed by one of the speakers. No doubt in the middle ages, 

 as in ancient times, the belief was common that the world was flat ; 

 but it was not a doctrine of the church. The passage so often cited 

 from 8t. Augustine'"' merely states that even '" if it be supposed or 

 " scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical 

 "fonn, it does not logically follow that the other side of the world is 

 " peopled, seeing that nobody has been there to see and that it may be 

 " all water or, if indeed land, may be bare of inhabitants." The logic 

 is unanswerable and the general opinion was that there were no anti- 

 podes ; though Columbus, than whom there never was a more fervent 

 Catholic, held to the contrary. There were two systems current. One 

 held, with Pomponius Mela to the notion of a southern hemisphere 

 separated from ours by an ocean impassable from heat, and the other 

 held with Ptolemy, the belief in a southern continent extending from 

 Africa to Eastern Asia and inclosing the Indian Ocean. During the 

 dissolution and re-crystallization of society there was very little oppor- 

 tunity to tliink about science and, for the masses, the times were in- 

 deed dark ; but, and the exception is fatal to President Wliite's thesis, 

 such science as there was existed in the cloister alone ; and that of 

 necessity was the case, for there, in those turbulent days, was the sole 

 refuge for a quiet thinker and in the church was the only career for a 

 man of gi-eat intellect but of humble birth ; because the highest posi- 

 tion in it was not limited by class or race or family. Thus it came 

 about that the chureli attained such power and that with the exception 

 of our own Alfred, laymen left so slight a record in the world of letters. 



