558 COSMOS. 



oscillations of the earth's crust, a subject that most especially 

 attracts our attention, since it constitutes the germ of modern 

 geognosy. Strabo expressly remarks, that the altered limits of 

 the sea and land are to be ascribed less to small inundations 

 than to the upheaval and depression of the bottom, for 

 " not only separate masses of rock and islands of different 

 dimensions, but entire continents, may be upheaved." Strabo, 

 like Herodotus, was an attentive observer of the descent of 

 nations, and of the diversities of the different races of men, 

 whom he singularly enough calls "land and air animals, which 

 require much light. "* We find the ethnological distinction 

 of races most sharply defined in the Commentaries of Julius 

 Caesar, and in the noble eulogy on Agricola by Tacitus. 



Unfortunately Strabo 's great work, which was so rich in facts, 

 and whose cosmical views we have already alluded to, remained 

 almost wholly unknown in Roman antiquity until the fifth 

 century, and was not even then made use of by that universal 

 collector, Pliny. It was not until the close of the middle 

 ages that Strabo exercised any essential influence on the 

 direction of ideas, and even then in a less marked degree than 

 that of the more mathematical and more tabularly concise geo- 

 graphy of Claudius Ptolemaeus, which was almost wholly 

 wanting in views of a truly physical character. This latter 

 work served as a guide to travellers as late as the sixteenth 

 century, whilst every new discovery of places was always sup- 

 posed to be recognised in it under some other appellation. 



In the same manner as natural historians long continued to 

 include all recently discovered plants and animals under the 

 classifying definitions of Linnaeus, the earliest maps of the 

 New Continent appeared in the atlas of Ptolemy, which Agatho- 

 dremon prepared at the same time that, in the remotest part of 

 Asia among the highly civilised Chinese, the western provinces 

 of the empire were already marked in forty-four divisions.f 

 The universal geography of Ptolemy has indeed the advantage 

 of presenting us with a picture of the whole world represented 

 graphically in outlines, and numerically in determinations 

 of places, according to their parallels of longitude and lati- 

 tude, and to the length of the day; but, notwithstanding the 

 constant reference to the advantages of astronomical results 



* Strabo, lib. xvii. p. 810. 



t Carl Hitter, Asien, th. v. s. 560. 



