28 COSMOS. 



very frequently been made from the earliest times of astro- 

 nomical inquiry between this swelling or convex elevation 

 of the earth's surface and carefully measured mountain 

 masses, I will select as objects of comparison the highest of 

 the known peaks of the Himalayas, namely, that of Kin- 

 tschindjinga, which was fixed by Colonel Waugh at 28,174 

 feet, and that portion of the elevated plateau of Thibet 

 which is nearest to the sacred lakes of Rakas-Tal and Man- 

 assarova, and which, according to Lieutenant Henry Strachey, 

 is situated at the mean height of 15,347 feet. The bulg- 

 ing of our planet at the equatorial zone is therefore not 



lost in such magnitudes, so that in these cases we are unable to deter- 

 mine its spherical form with the same accuracy as in the case of a sphere 

 made by a turning-lathe, or as well as the sculptor, who judges from 

 his conceptions of form, for here we are obliged to determine by phy- 

 sical and less delicate perception " (Strabo, ii, p. 112). "The world ia 

 at once a work of nature and of providence, a work of nature inasmuch 

 as all things tend towards one point, the centre of the whole, round 

 which they group themselves, the less dense element (water) containing 

 the denser (earth)." (Strabo, xvii, p. 809). Wherever we find the figure 

 of the earth described by the Greeks, it is compared (Cleom. Cycl. Theor. i, 

 8, p. 51) with a flat or centrally depressed disc, a cylinder (Anaximander), 

 a cube or pyramid, and lastly we find it generally held to be a sphere not* 

 withstanding the long contest of the Epicureans, who denied the ten- 

 dency of attraction towards the centre. The idea of compression does not 

 seem to have presented itself to their imagination. The elongated earth 

 of Democritus was only the disc of Thales lengthened in one direction. 

 The drum-like form, TO cfxrjua rv^Travoaofg, which seems more especially 

 to have emanated from Leucippus (Pint, de Plac. Philos. iii, 10; Galen. 

 Hist. Phil, cap. 21; Aristotle, de Ccelo, ii, 13 page, 293 Bekker), appears 

 to have been founded upon the idea of a hemisphere with a flat basis, 

 which probably represented the equator, whilst the curvature was re- 

 garded as the oiKovukvr}. A passage in Pliny, regarding Pearls (xi, 

 54), elucidates this form, whilst Aristotle merely compares the segments 

 of the sphere with the drum (Meteorol. ii, 5, a 10, Ideler, t. i, p. 563), as 

 we also find from the commentary of Olympiodorus (Ideler, t. i, p. 301). 

 I have here purposely avoided referring to two passages which are well 

 known to me in Agathemerus (de Geographia, lib. i, cap. 1, p. 2, Hudson) 

 and in Eusebius (Evangel. Prceparat. t. iv, p. 125, ed. Gaisford, 1843), 

 because they prove with what inaccuracy later writers have often 

 ascribed to the ancients views which were totally foreign to them. 

 According to these versions, " Eudoxus gave for the length and breadth 

 of the earth's disc values which stood in relation to one another as 

 1 to 2; the same is said in reference to Dictearchus, the pupil of Aris- 

 totle, who, however, advanced his own special proofs of the spherical 

 form of the earth (Marcian, Capella, lib. vi, p. 192). Hipparchus re- 

 garded tha earth as rpa7rtoa<^, and Thales held it to be a sphere!" 



