INFLUENCE OF THE MACEDONIAN CAMPAIGNS. 521 



country and its organic productions, have placed more correct 

 elements of information at the disposal of the critic than those 

 yielded to the partial knowledge of the cavilling Eratosthenes, 

 or of Strabo and Pliny.* 



If we compare, according to differences in longitude, the 

 length of the Mediterranean with the distance from west to 

 east, which separates Asia Minor from the shores of the 

 Hyphasis (Beas), from the Altars of return, w r e shall perceive 

 that the geographical knowledge of the Greeks was doubled 

 in extent in the course of a few years. In order to define 

 more accurately that w r hich we have termed the mass of 

 materials, added to the sciences of natural philosophy and 

 physical geography, by the different campaigns and by the 



* Compare Schwanbeck, " defide Megasthenis el pretio" in his edi- 

 tion of that writer, pp. 59-77. Megasthenes frequently visited Palibo- 

 thra, the court of the King of Magadha. He was deeply initiated in the 

 study of Indian chronology, and relates " how, in past times, the All 

 had three times come to freedom ; how three ages of the world had run 

 their course, and how the fourth had begun in his own time" (Lassen, 

 Indisclie Alter thumskunde, bd. i. s. 510). Hesiod's doctrine of four ages 

 of the world, as connected with four great elementary destructions, 

 which together embrace a period of 18028 years, is also to be met with 

 among the Mexicans. (Humboldt, Vues des Cordilleres et Monumens 

 des peuples indigenes de lAmerique, t. ii. pp. 119-129.) A remarkable 

 proof of the exactness of Megasthenes, has been discovered in modern 

 times by the study of the Rigveda and of the Mahabharata. Consult 

 what Megasthenes relates concerning " the land of the long-living 

 blessed beings" in the most northern parts of India, the land of Uttara- 

 kuru (probably north of Kashmcer, towards Belurtagh), which, according 

 to his Greek views, he associates with the supposed " thousand years of 

 the life of the Hyperboreans." (Lassen, in the Zeitschriftfur die Kunde 

 des Morgenlandes, bd. ii. s. 62.) A tradition mentioned by Ctesias 

 (who has been too long esteemed below his merits), of a sacred place in 

 the northern desert, may be noticed in connection with this point. (Ind., 

 cap. viii. ed. Baehr, pp. 249 and 285). The martichoras mentioned by 

 Aristotle (Hist, de Animal., ii. 3, 10; t. i. p. 51, Schneider), the griffin 

 half eagle and half lion, the kartazonon noticed by JElian, and a one- 

 horned wild ass, are certainly spoken of by Ctesias as real animals ; they 

 were not, however, the creations of his inventive fancy, for he mistook, as 

 Heeren and Cuvier have remarked, the pictured forms of symbolical 

 animals, seen on Persian monuments, for representations of strange beasts 

 still living in the remote parts of India. There is, however, as Guig- 

 naut has well observed, much difficulty in identifying the martichoras 

 with Persepolitan symbols. (Creuzer, Religions de VAntiquite; note* 

 et eclair cissements, p. 720.) 



