CHAPTER V 

 BION AND THE DOCTRINE OF A ROUND EARTH 



THE parentage of ideas is as a rule obscure. Rarely may we 

 trace their primigenial forms ; they grow rather than are born. 

 Empedocles seems vaguely to have antedated the especial ideas 

 of Mr. Darwin by a matter of twenty-five centuries. This is 

 more or less true of almost all our larger world conceptions. 



In the fifteenth century the generality of men, in Europe at 

 least, still believed that the earth is flat. Some doubted ; they 

 were few. It was the old question : Who was there fool enough 

 to dream that there could be a race of men on the other side 

 of the earth, with their heads pointing downward into the sky ? 

 What would keep them from falling off ? So to the court of 

 Ferdinand and Isabella, doubtless the most enlightened then 

 in Europe, for to it Columbus of preference appealed, the 

 arguments of the Genoese navigator seemed novel enough. 

 They had been current among the more enlightened people of 

 Greece at least four centuries before Christ. 



Indeed for six hundred years after the time of Plato and 

 Aristotle, it would probably be difficult to find a single in- 

 structed writer teaching any other doctrine. The beliefs of 

 Alexander or of Csesar, of Demosthenes or of Cicero, in this 

 differed in no material way from those of Napoleon or Mr. 

 Gladstone. Whence did the idea come ? 



It seems older than history ; older, no doubt, than the 

 Pyramids. To the very earliest of Chaldean and Egyptian 

 observers it was clear enough that the earth did not extend 

 endlessly in space, for the sun, the moon, the stars revolve 

 about it. And if the earth is not infinite in extent, then it 

 must have some shape. But what ? The simplest notion 

 undoubtedly was to think of it as flat, perhaps as a flat disk, 

 resting on the water. That was the belief of the Chinese, the 

 Hebrews, and other primitive people, just as it is the belief 



of such savage tribes as have reached a similar stage of culture 



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