Among the Latin cosmographers we may here cite one who flourished in the first century after Christ, Pomponius Mela, who wrote a treatise, called De Situ Orbis. From whatever source, whether traditional or otherwise, he arrived at the conclusion, he divided the earth into two continents, our own and that of the Antichthones, which reached to our antipodes. This map was in use till the time of Christopher Columbus, who modified it in the matter of the position of this second continent, which till then remained a matter of mystery.
Fig. 34.—Pomponius Mela's Cosmography.
Of those who in ancient times added to the knowledge then possessed of cosmography, we should not omit to mention the name of Pytheas, of Marseilles, who flourished in the fourth century before our era. His chief observations, however, were not so closely related to geography as to the relation of the earth with the heavenly bodies. By the observation of the gnomon at mid-day on the day of the solstice he determined the obliquity of the ecliptic in his epoch. By the observation of the height of the pole, he discovered that in his time it was not marked by any star, but formed a quadrilateral with three neighbouring stars, β of the little Bear and κ and α of the Dragon.
CHAPTER X.
COSMOGRAPHY AND GEOGRAPHY OF THE CHURCH.
After the writers mentioned in the last chapter a long interval elapsed without any progress being made in the knowledge of the shape or configuration of the earth. From the fall of the Roman Empire, whose colonies themselves gave a certain knowledge of geography, down to the fifteenth century, when the great impetus was given to discovery by the adventurous voyagers of Spain and Portugal, there was nothing but servile copying from ancient authors, who were even misrepresented when they were not understood. Even the peninsula of India was only known by the accounts of Orientals and the writings of the Ancients until the beginning of the fifteenth century. Vague notions, too, were held as to the limits of Africa, and even of Europe and Asia—while of course they knew nothing of America, in spite of their marking on their maps an antichthonal continent to the south.
Denys, the traveller, a Greek writer of the first century, and Priscian, his Latin commentator of the fourth, still maintained the old errors with regard to the earth. According to them the earth is not round, but leaf-shaped; its boundaries are not so arranged as to form everywhere a regular circle. Macrobius, in his system of the world, proves clearly that he had no notion that Africa was continued to the south of Ethiopia, that is of the tenth degree of N. latitude. He thought, like Cleanthus and Crates and other ancient authors, that the regions that lay nearest the tropics, and were burnt by the sun, could not be inhabited; and that the equatorial regions were occupied by the ocean. He divided the hemisphere into five zones, of which only two were habitable. "One of them," he said, "is occupied by us, and the other by men of whose nature we are ignorant."