78 THE WORLD MACHINE 



Mesopotamia, under the khalifate of Al-Maimun. When that 

 princely patron of science and letters sat upon the Mohammedan 

 throne, Eratosthenes had been dead a thousand years ; so 

 long did it take before his ideas, with the voyages of Columbus 

 and Da Gama, might come into practical effect in the affairs 

 of the world ; so long did the weight of ignorance and a de- 

 grading superstition hang over and benumb the minds of men. 



Eratosthenes, we know, was not merely one of the founders 

 of astronomy, but the founder of scientific geography. And 

 what a widening of horizons the new map of the world, as con- 

 structed by the Alexandrian geographer, must have wrought ! 

 Means of communication then were slow ; no " liners " then 

 raced straight and swiftly from port to port. Men did not 

 venture far. Though there were records of the compass in 

 use in China nine centuries back of this, it was unknown to 

 the Greek and Tyrean mariners, who crept along the coast 

 of the Sea-In-Media-Terra, the known terra, and out through 

 the Pillars of Hercules to Ultima Thule. From the ports of 

 Tyre to the Gateway of the Night was scarce 2000 miles. The 

 Hellespont and the Euxine carried the map-maker's stylus 

 scarce another thousand eastward. Half this combined dis- 

 tance reached from the mythical borders of Hyperborea to 

 the fabulous regions of the Upper Nile. The known earth was 

 a rectangle of about the present size of the United States. And 

 the measures of Eratosthenes made this a scant fortieth part 

 of the whole surface of the globe. In his estimate, what was 

 known was to the unknown as 39 to i. 



Is it the impression that we have here merely an intellectual 

 conception that the meaning of it in no wise came home to 

 any of the ancients that there was no vivid sense of new 

 continents, new worlds to explore ? Listen, then, to a passage 

 in old Strabo ; he is telling of the ideas of Eratosthenes, who, 

 he says, held " that if the extent of the Atlantic Ocean were 

 not an obstacle, we might easily pass by sea from Iberia 

 (i.e. Spain) to India, still keeping in the same parallel (of the 

 temperate zone), the remaining portion of which parallel, 

 measured as above in stadia (252,000) occupies more than a third 

 of the whole circle ; since the parallel drawn through Athens, 

 in which we have taken the distances from India to Iberia, does 

 not contain in the whole 200,000 stadia." x 



1 Strabo, i. p. 101 ; ed. Bohn. 



