central point and the object of all creation ; a 

 whom the divine nature of thought was firs 



530 . COSMOS. 



familiar with a court-life, from his long sojourn with Philip of 

 Macedon, he counselled him to " converse as little as possible 

 with the king, and where necessity required that he should do 

 so, always to coincide with the views of the sovereign."* 



Aided by the co-operation of chosen men of the school of 

 the Stagirite, Callisthenes, who was already conversant with 

 nature before he left Greece, gave a higher direction to the 

 investigations of his companions in the extended sphere of 

 observation now first opened to them. The richness of vegeta- 

 tion, and the diversity of animal forms, the configuration of the 

 soil, and the periodical rising of great rivers, no longer sufficed 

 to engage exclusive attention, for the time was come when 

 man and the different races of mankind, in their manifold 

 gradations of colour and of civilisation, could not fail to be 

 regarded, according to Aristotle's own expression, j* " as the 



and as the beings in 

 first made manifest." 

 From the little that remains to us of the narratives of Onesi- 

 critus, who was so much censured in antiquity, we find that 

 the Macedonians were astonished on penetrating far to the 

 east to meet with no African, curly-haired negroes, although 

 they found the Indian races spoken of by Herodotus as " dark- 

 coloured, and resembling Ethiopians."^: The influence of the 

 atmosphere on colour, and the different effect produced by dry 

 and moist winds, were carefully noticed. In the early 

 Homeric ages, and even long after that period, the depend- 

 ence of the temperature of the air on latitude was wholly 

 unknown, and the relations of east and west then constituted 

 the whole thermic meteorology of the Greeks. The countries 

 lying to the east were regarded as near the sun sun lands, 

 and the inhabitants as " coloured by the near sun-god in his 

 course with a sooty lustre, and their hair dried and crisped 

 with the heat of his rays." 



* Valcr. Maxim., vii. 2; "ut cum Rege aut rarissime aut quam 

 jucundissiino loqueretur." 



f Aristot., Polit^ i. 8, and Etli. ad Eudemum, vii. 14. 



J Strabo, lib. xv. pp. 690 and 695. Herod., iii. 101. 



Thus says Theodectes of Phaselis, see p. 362. Northern tracts of 

 /and were considered to lie more towards the West, and southern countries 

 to the East. Consult Volcker, Ueber Homerische Geographie und 

 Weltkunde, s. 43 und 87. The indefinite meaning of the word Indies, 

 even at that age, as connected with ideas of position, of the complexion of 



