THE FIGURE OP THE EARTH. 27 



equator amounts to about 645,457 feet ; about 11-J-, or more 

 accurately, 11.492 geographical miles. As a comparison has 



those winds prevail, which change with the season of the year." Of 

 these two opinions regarding the elevation of the land in Northern 

 Asia, (the Scythian Europe of Herodotus) and in the equatorial zone, the 

 former of the two, with the pertinacity characteristic of error, has kept 

 its ground for nearly two thousand years, and has given occasion to the 

 geological myth of an uninterrupted plateau in the Tartar district 

 lying to the north of the Himalayas, whilst the other opinion could only 

 be justified in reference to a portion of Asia, lying beyond the tropical 

 zone, and consequently applies only to the colossal, " elevated or 

 mountain plateau, Meru," which is celebrated in the most ancient and 

 noblest memorials of Indian poetry. (See "Wilson's Diet. Sanscrit and 

 English, 1832, p. 674, where the word Meru is explained to signify an 

 elevated plateau). I have thought it necessary to enter thus circum- 

 stantially into this question, in order that I might refute the hypothesis 

 of the intellectual Freret, who, without indicating any passages from 

 Greek writers, and merely alluding to one which seemed to treat of 

 tropical rain, interprets the opinion advanced regarding bulgings of the 

 soil as having reference to compression or elongation at the poles. In 

 the Mem. de I'Acad. des Inscriptions, t. xviii, 1753, p. 112, FreVet expresses 

 himself as follows : " To explain the rains which prevailed in those 

 equinoctial regions, which the conquests of Alexander first made known, 

 it was supposed that there were currents which drove the clouds from 

 the poles towards the equator, where, in default of mountains to stop 

 their progress, they were arrested by the general elevation of the soil, 

 whose surface at the equator is farther removed from the centre than 

 under the poles. Some physicists have ascribed to the globe the figure 

 of a spheroid, which bulges at the equator and is flattened towards the 

 poles, while on the contrary, in the opinion of those of the ancients who 

 believed that the earth was elongated towards the poles, the polar 

 regions are farther removed than the equatorial zone from the centre 

 of the earth." I can find no evidence in the works of the ancients to 

 justify these assertions. In the third section of the first book of Strabo 

 (page 48, Casaub.), it is expressly stated that, " after Eratosthenes has 

 observed that the whole earth is spherical, although not like a sphere 

 that has been made by a turning-lathe (an expression that is borrowed 

 from Herodotus, iv. 36), and exhibits many deviations from this form, 

 he adduces numerous modifications of shape which have been produced 

 by the action of water and fire, by earthquakes, subterranean currents 

 of wind (elastic vapours?), and other causes of the same kind, which, 

 however, are not given in the order of their occurrence, for the rotun- 

 dity of the entire earth results from the co-ordination of the whole, such 

 modifications in no degree affecting the general form of our earth, the 

 lesser vanishing in the greater." Subsequently we read, also in Gros- 

 kurd's admirable translation, " that the earth, together with the sea, ia 

 spherical, the two constituting one and the same surface. The projec- 

 tion of the laud, which is inconsiderable and may remain unnoticed ia 



