A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



been met with, and reason assures us of the similarity 

 of this place which our senses have not been tempted 

 to survey." He points out that whereas sailors have 

 not circumnavigated the globe, that they had not been 

 prevented from doing so by any continent, and it seems 

 to him altogether unlikely that the Atlantic Ocean is 

 divided into two seas by narrow isthmuses so placed as 

 to prevent circumnavigation. ' ' How much more prob- 

 able that it is confluent and uninterrupted. This 

 theory," he adds, "goes better with the ebb and flow 

 of the ocean. Moreover (and here his reasoning be- 

 comes more fanciful) , the greater the amount of moist- 

 ure surrounding the earth, the easier would the heaven- 

 ly bodies be supplied with vapor from thence." Yet 

 he is disposed to believe, following Plato, that the 

 tradition "concerning the island of Atlantos might be 

 received as something more than idle fiction, it having 

 been related by Solon, on the authority of the Egyptian 

 priests, that this island, almost as large as a continent, 

 was formerly in existence although now it had disap- 

 peared." 2 



In a word, then, Strabo entertains no doubt what- 

 ever that it would be possible to sail around the globe 

 from Spain to India. Indeed, so matter-of-fact an in- 

 ference was this that the feat of Columbus would have 

 seemed less surprising in the first century of our era 

 than it did when actually performed in the fifteenth 

 century. The terrors of the great ocean held the mar- 

 iner back, rather than any doubt as to where he would 

 arrive at the end of the voyage. 



Coupled with the idea that the habitable portion of 

 the earth is an island, there was linked a tolerably 



260 



