516 COSMOS. 



At Phasis, the navigators of the Euxine again found them- 

 selves on a coast beyond which a Sun Lake was supposed to 

 be situated, and south of Gadeira and Tartessus their eyes, for 

 the first time, ranged over a boundless waste of waters. It 

 was this circumstance which, for fifteen hundred years, gave to 

 the gate of the inner sea a peculiar character of importanc-e. 

 Ever striving to pass onwards, Pho3nicians, Greeks, Arabs, 

 Catalans, Major cans, Frenchmen from Dieppe and La Ro- 

 chelle, Genoese, Venetians, Portuguese, and Spaniards in turn 

 attempted to advance across the Atlantic Ocean, long held 

 to be a miry, shallow, dark, and misty sea, Mare tenebrosum; 

 until proceeding from station to station, as it were, these 

 southern nations, after gaining the Canaries and the Azores, 

 finally came to the New Continent, which, however, had 

 already been reached by the Northmen at an earlier period and 

 from a different direction. 



Whilst Alexander was opening the far east, the great Sta- 

 girite* was led, by a consideration of the form of the earth, to 

 conceive the idea of the proximity of India to the Pillars of 

 Hercules; whilst Strabo had even conjectured that there 

 might be " many other habitable tracts of land] in the northern 

 hemisphere, perhaps in the parallel which passes through 

 those Pillars, the island of Rhodes and Thinse, between the 

 coasts of Western Europe and Eastern Asia." The hypothe- 

 sis of the locality of such lands, in the prolongation of the 

 major axis of the Mediterranean, was connected with a grand 

 geographical view of Eratosthenes, current in antiquity, 

 and in accordance with which the whole of the Old Con- 

 tinent, in its widest extension from west to east, and nearly in 

 the 36 of latitude, was supposed to present an almost con- 

 tinuous line of elevation. | 



vgha and ogh (see my Examen critique de I'hist. de la Oeogr. t. i. pp. 

 33 and 182). 



* Aristot., de Ccelo, ii. 14 (p. 298, b. Bekk.); Meteor., ii. 5 (p. 362, 

 Bekk.) Compare my Examen critique, t. i. pp. 125-130. Seneca ven- 

 tures to say (Nat. Qucest. in preefat. 11), " Contemnet curiosus spectator 

 domicilii (terrae) angustias. Quantum enim est quod ab ultimis iittorl- 

 bus Hispaniee usque ad Indos jacet] Paucissiinorum dierum spatium, 

 ei navem suus ventus implevit." (Examen critique, t. i. p. 158.) 



t Strabo, lib. i. pp. 65 and 118, Casaub. (Examen critique, t. i. p, 

 L52.) 



J In the Piaphragma of Dicaearchus, l*y which the earth is divided, 



