96 
MOUNTAINS AND THEIR ORIGIN. 
place on his map ; Asia is sketched out, includ- 
ing the Persian Gulf, with the large rivers pour- 
ing into it ; and the course of the Ganges is 
traced, though he makes it flow east and empty 
into the Pacific, instead of turning southward 
and emptying into the Indian Ocean. 
Eratosthenes, two centuries before Christ, is 
the first geographer who makes some attempt to 
determine the trend to the land and water, pre- 
senting a suggestion that the earth is broader in 
one direction than in the other. In his map he 
adds also the geographical results derived from 
the expeditions of Alexander the Great. 
Ptolemy, who flourished in Alexandria in the 
reign of Hadrian, is the next geographer of emi- 
nence, and he shows us something of Africa ; for, 
in his time, the Phoenicians, in their commercial 
expeditions, had sailed far to the south, had 
reached the termination of Africa, with ocean 
lying all around it, and had seen the sun to the 
north of them. This last assertion, however, 
Ptolemy does not credit, and he is as sceptical of 
the open ocean surrounding the extremity of Af- 
rica as modern geographers and explorers have 
been of the existence of Kane’s open Arctic Sea. 
He believes that what the Phoenician traders took 
to be the broad ocean must be part of an inland 
sea, corresponding to the Mediteranean, with 
which he was so familiar. His map includes 
