SLEEP AND AWAKENING 13 
ological difficulty was arrived at the spherical Earth was 
banished from Christendom on the plea that it was in 
contradiction to Scripture. 
Lactantius early in the fourth century covered with 
ridicule those who could believe in so monstrous a con- 
ception as a spherical Earth, and without using any ar- 
gument save “ It is written ” he denounced the whole 
theory as a Greek invention. Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 
monk who had travelled to India and could not reconcile 
his own observations with a flat Earth, set himself in the 
sixth century to the hopeless task of constructing an 
Earth out of his own head on the model of the Jewish 
tabernacle with a prodigious conical mountain in the 
midst for the sun to rise from and set behind. 
The Earth According to Cosmas Indicopleustes. 
It is an unedifying story. The temporary result was 
that in the mind of Europe the Earth became once more 
as flat as a pancake, and the wheel-maps of the Middle 
Ages reverted to the circular disc of the earliest Greeks. 
The Antarctic problem, after being stigmatised as heresy, 
