8 THE ANTARCTIC. 



any event, Ptolemy, through his firm hold of the 

 dogma that the Indian and perhaps even the Atlantic 

 Ocean was enclosed, was the originator of the views held 

 with the greatest tenacity till only last century, respect- 

 ing the existence of a great terminal southern continent. 

 This Terra anstralis, either inhabitable or inhabited, 

 and presumably the extreme boundary of the earth in the 

 south, was proved by the discoveries of the great 

 navigator James Cook to have no existence as regards 

 its assumed character and contour. 



In the Middle Ages, Arabic learning and science took 

 the place of that of ancient Greece ; indeed the Greek 

 notions respecting the world owe their continued trans- 

 mission and existence to oriental teaching. In Christian 

 Europe this knowledge was limited to a few learned 

 thinkers ; while among the larger numbers of the com- 

 paratively educated, even in the days of the fathers of 

 the Church, Greek science and speculation gradually 

 sank into complete neglect and oblivion. Meanwhile 

 the Arabs preserved not only the correct, but also the 

 erroneous, teaching of the Greeks in the matter of geo- 

 graphy. Above all, they held with pedantic obstinacy 

 to the views of Ptolemy as to an enclosed Indian 

 Ocean, even though they took its southern boundary 

 to be merely an unknown country. Moreover, they 

 made the almost unpardonable mistake of representing 

 the African coast from Cape Gardafui onwards as 

 stretching away to the east, so that the Sofala coast 

 on their charts lay opposite to the island of Ceylon, and 

 Madagascar even in the neighbourhood of the Sunda 

 Isles. This dogmatism was all the more indefensible 

 because the Arab sailors were perfectly well acquainted 

 with the actual facts. Moreover, eminent geographers, 

 whose own travels extended to the East African coast 

 — for instance, the renowned Mas'udi (died 956) — em- 

 phatically declared that the direction of the coast as 



