Footnote 311: Strabo, xi. 7, § 3.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 312: Robertson, Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, Dublin, 1791, p. 55. I never have occasion to consult Dr. Robertson without being impressed anew with his scientific habit of thought and the solidity of his scholarship; and in none of his works are these qualities better illustrated than in this noble essay.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 313: The Polos sailed back from China to the Persian gulf in 1292-94; see below, p. [282].[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 314: The name "Seres" appears on the map of Pomponius Mela (cir. A. D. 50), while "Sinæ" does not. See below, p. [304].
Jam Tartessiaco quos solverat æquore Titan
In noctem diffusus equos, jungebat Eoïs
Littoribus, primique novo Phaethonte retecti
Seres lanigeris repetebant vellera lucis.
Silius Italicus, lib. vi. ad init. [Back to Main Text]
Footnote 315: For this whole subject see Colonel Sir Henry Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither, London, 1866, 2 vols.,—a work of profound learning and more delightful than a novel.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 316: Its title is Χριστιανῶν βίβλος, ἑρμηνεία εἰς τὴν Οκτάτευχον, i. e. against Ptolemy's Geography in eight books. The name Cosmas Indicopleustes seems merely to mean "the cosmographer who has sailed to India." He begins his book in a tone of extreme and somewhat unsavory humility: Ἀνοίγω τὰ μογιλάλα καὶ βραδύγλωσσα χείλη ὁ ἁμαρτωλὸς καὶ τάλας ἐγώ—"I, the sinner and wretch, open my stammering, stuttering lips," etc.—The book has been the occasion of some injudicious excitement within the last half century. Cosmas gave a description of some comparatively recent inscriptions on the peninsula of Sinai, and because he could not find anybody able to read them, he inferred that they must be records of the Israelites on their passage through the desert. (Compare the Dighton rock, above, p. [214].) Whether in the sixth century of grace or in the nineteenth, your unregenerate and unchastened antiquary snaps at conclusions as a drowsy dog does at flies. Some years ago an English clergyman, Charles Forster, started up the nonsense again, and argued that these inscriptions might afford a clue to man's primeval speech! Cf. Bunsen, Christianity and Mankind, vol. iii. p. 231; Müller and Donaldson, History of Greek Literature, vol. iii. p. 353; Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene, vol. ii. p. 177.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 317: Such views have their advocates even now. There still lives, I believe, in England, a certain John Hampden, who with dauntless breast maintains that the earth is a circular plane with centre at the north pole and a circumference of nearly 30,000 miles where poor misguided astronomers suppose the south pole to be. The sun moves across the sky at a distance of about 800 miles. From the boundless abyss beyond the southern circumference, with its barrier of icy mountains, came the waters which drowned the antediluvian world; for, as this author quite reasonably observes, "on a globular earth such a deluge would have been physically Impossible." Hampden's title is somewhat like that of Cosmas,—The New Manual of Biblical Cosmography, London, 1877; and he began in 1876 to publish a periodical called The Truth-Seeker's Oracle and Scriptural Science Review. Similar views have been set forth by one Samuel Rowbotham, under the pseudonym of "Parallax," Zetetic Astronomy. Earth not a Globe. An experimental inquiry into the true figure of the earth, proving it a plane without orbital or axial motion, etc., London, 1873; and by a William Carpenter, One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe, Baltimore, 1885. There is a very considerable quantity of such literature afloat, the product of a kind of mental aberration that thrives upon paradox. When I was superintendent of the catalogue of Harvard University library, I made the class "Eccentric Literature" under which to group such books,—the lucubrations of circle-squarers, angle-trisectors, inventors of perpetual motion, devisers of recipes for living forever without dying, crazy interpreters of Daniel and the Apocalypse, upsetters of the undulatory theory of light, the Bacon-Shakespeare lunatics, etc.; a dismal procession of long-eared bipeds, with very raucous bray. The late Professor De Morgan devoted a bulky and instructive volume to an account of such people and their crotchets. See his Budget of Paradoxes, London, 1872.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 318: Cosmas, ii. 138. Further mention of China was made early in the seventh century by Theophylactus Samocatta, vii. 7. See Yule's Cathay, vol. i. pp. xlix., clxviii.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 319: Robertson, Historical Disquisition, p. 93; Pears, The Fall of Constantinople, p. 177,—a book of great merit.[Back to Main Text]