[149] This scene will be recalled, easily, by many leading ethnologists in America, and especially by Mr. E. G. Squier, formerly minister of the United States to Central America.
[150] The meteorological battle is hardly fought out yet. Many excellent men seem still to entertain views almost identical with those of over two thousand years ago, depicted in The Clouds of Aristophanes.
[151] These texts are Ezekiel v. 5 and xxxviii. 12. The progress of geographical knowledge, evidently, caused them to be softened down somewhat in our King James's version; but the first of them reads, in the Vulgate, "Ista est Hierusalem, in medio gentium posui eam et in circuitu ejus terras;" and the second reads in the Vulgate "in medio terræ," and in the Septuagint ἑπι τὁν ὁμφαλὁν τἡς γἡς. That the literal centre of the earth was meant, see proof in St. Jerome, Commentar. in Ezekiel, lib. ii., and for general proof, see Leopardi, "Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi," pp. 207, 208. For an idea of orthodox geography in the middle ages, see Wright's Essay on Archæology, vol. ii., chapter "On the Map of the World in Hereford Cathedral." For an example of the depth to which this idea of Jerusalem as the centre had entered into the thinking of the great poet of the middle ages, see Dante, Inferno, Canto xxxiv.:
"E se' or sotto l'emisperio giunto,
Ch' è opposito a quel, che la gran secca
Coverchia, e sotto 'l cui colmo consunto
Fu l'uom che nacque e visse senza pecca."
[152] See Michaelis, Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, 1874, vol. ii., p. 3. The writer of the present article himself witnessed the reluctance of a very conscientious man to answer the questions of a census marshal, Mr. Lewis Hawley, of Syracuse, N. Y., and this reluctance was based upon the reasons assigned in II. Samuel chapter xxiv. 1, and I. Chronicles, chapter xxi. 1, for the numbering of the children of Israel.
[153] See De Morgan, Paradoxes, pp. 214-220.
[154] For Dupanloup, Lettre à un Cardinal, see the Revue de Thérapeutique, 1868, p. 221.