30 COSMOS. 



amounts to about 645,457 feet ; about lli, or, more accu- 

 rately, 1 1*492 geographical miles. As a comparison has 



moderate temperature which prevails under the equator not only to the 

 more rapid transit of the sun (Geminus, Elem. Astron., c. 13; Cleom,, 

 Ci/cl. Theor., 1, 6), but more especially to the bulging of the earth (see 

 ray Exameri Cnt. de la Geogr., t. iii., p. 19i-152). Both maintain, ac- 

 cording to the testimony of Strabo (ii., p. 97), " that the district lying 

 immediately below the equator is the highest, on which account much 

 rain falls there, in consequence of the very large accumulation of 

 northern clouds at the period when 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 Herodo- 

 tus) and in the equatorial zone, the former of the two, with the perti- 

 nacity characteristic of error, has kept its ground for nearly two thou- 

 sand years, and has given occasion to the geological myth of an un- 

 interrupted plateau in the Tartar district lying to the north of the 

 Himalayas, while 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 In- 

 dian poetry. (See Wilson's Did. 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 circumstantially into this ques- 

 tion, 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, inter- 

 prets the opinion advanced regarding bulgings of the soil as having 

 reference to compression or elongation at the poles. In the M^m. de 

 VAcad. des Inscriptions, t. xviii., 1753, p. 112, Freret expresses him- 

 self as follows : " To explain the rains which prevailed in those equi- 

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

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

 the poles toward 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 toward the 

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

 who believed that the earth was elongated toward 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 

 (p. 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 vapors ?), 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- 



