EARLIEST MEASURES OF THE EARTH 79 



Here are the identical ideas of Toscanelli and Columbus put 

 forth by the man most eminent in science and learning in 

 the most learned, most innovating, sceptical, and restless city 

 of antiquity ; and, what is yet more extraordinary, with the 

 same erroneous ideas of distance. The Alexandrian figures the 

 span from Iberia westward to India at " more than a third " 

 of the whole circle. We know now that it is twice this. He 

 was misled |by the estimates of the distance from India to 

 Iberia, which could only be traditional, and not by his ideas of 

 the size of the earth. Seventeen hundred years afterward, 

 Columbus and his Florentine proponent, accepting the guidance 

 of Ptolemy, were still further from the truth. 



Again, is it to be supposed that, great as was the fame and 

 authority of the Alexandrian geographer, his ideas fell upon 

 listless ears ? By no means, for in one way and another his 

 Geographica stirred a whole host of commentators and dis- 

 putants, among them Polybius the historian and the great 

 astronomer Hipparchus. At near three hundred years after, 

 Strabo writes a vast work that is little more than a running 

 comment on the statements, estimates, and ideas of his pre- 

 decessor. Strabo is especially interested in this thought of 

 the circumnavigation of the earth, and, apropos of the passage 

 given above, offers a curious muddle of prophetic insight and 

 logic bad enough for Aristotelian ; but you will recollect that 

 Strabo was very old when he wrote : 



" Here, too, his reasoning (Eratosthenes') is incorrect ; for 

 this speculation respecting the temperate zone which we in- 

 habit, and whereof the inhabitable earth is a part, devolves 

 properly upon those who make mathematics a study. But it 

 is not equally the province of one treating of the habitable world. 

 For by this term we mean only that portion of the temperate 

 zone with which we are acquainted. But it is quite possible 

 that in the temperate zone there may be two or even more habitable 

 continents, especially near the circle of latitude which is drawn 

 through Athens and the Atlantic Ocean " (i.e. the Pillars of 

 Hercules). 1 



What an amazing guess ! And consider that all this was 



from four to seven centuries before the churchly fathers were 



gravely deciding that the earth could not be round, because then 



the folk at the antipodes would be hanging by their feet with 



1 Loc. cit., i. p. 102 ; ed. Bohn. 



