Of The Action Of The First Cause No Examples Can Be More Striking Than We
Find In The False Conception
Of the Caspian as a gulf of the Ocean,
entertained by Strabo, and the opposite error in regard to the
Indian Sea
held by Ptolemy, who regards it as an enclosed basin, when we contrast
these with the correct ideas on both subjects possessed by Herodotus. The
later Geographers no doubt knew his statements, but did not appreciate
them, probably from not possessing the evidence on which they were based.
[Sidenote: General characteristics of Mediaeval Cosmography.]
80. As regards the second cause alleged, we may say that down nearly to
the middle of the 15th century cosmographers, as a rule, made scarcely any
attempt to reform their maps by any elaborate search for new matter, or by
lights that might be collected from recent travellers. Their world was in
its outline that handed down by the traditions of their craft, as
sanctioned by some Father of the Church, such as Orosius or Isidore, as
sprinkled with a combination of classical and mediaeval legend; Solinus
being the great authority for the former. Almost universally the earth's
surface is represented as filling the greater part of a circular disk,
rounded by the ocean; a fashion that already existed in the time of
Aristotle and was ridiculed by him.[1] No dogma of false geography was
more persistent or more pernicious than this. Jerusalem occupies the
central point, because it was found written in the Prophet Ezekiel:
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