Everyday Objects; Or, Picturesque Aspects of Natural History.

by W. H. Davenport Adams

Aristotle, bolder than Eudoxes, was led to the conception of this sphericity by simple consideration of mechanics. The earth, he said, must be a sphere, because each particle of matter is carried, by gravity, towards the centre; and as this fact is general, the superficial particles must be at an equal distance from the centre. This theoretical view was adopted by Archimedes, who applied it to the waters covering the terrestrial surface. Aristotle went further; he saw the rotundity of the earth in the shadow thrown by the latter on the bright face of the moon during its eclipses.

It is a noteworthy fact that the arguments of Aristotle, founded on a method to which all the progress of science is due, remained unaccepted for two thousand years. And why?

We shall attempt to explain.

Among those subjects whose comprehension seems to have been specially difficult to the mind of man, we must include the fact that the earth floats without any solid support in the infinity of space, and carries its denizens on its surface, both above and below.

Our creeds, which have ever pretended to explain everything in the physical as well as in the moral order, have here endeavoured to come to the assistance of the weakness of the human mind. And as each creed asserts itself to be the best, to the exclusion of every other, men began to imagine for the earth a navel, and placed it where it was supposed pleasing to the divinity.

The Greek priests dismissed a couple of eagles, one towards the west, the other towards the east; the place where these favourite birds of Jove, of the "Father of gods and men," encountered each other, was to be considered the "navel" of the earth. It chanced to be Delphos, whose oracle was the most esteemed in the ancient world; the sacerdotal caste accumulated there immense wealth. The Greek priests prudently refrained from dealing with the difficult problem of the earth's solid support.

The Hebrew pontiffs, however, were not so reserved. After having made Jerusalem the "navel of the world," they allowed for the earth itself seven solid columns as a foundation. The question of the Antipodes, in which the greatest intellects of antiquity believed,—Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle,—was thus pontifically judged and condemned. And Christians who preferred to follow the Judaical observance of external ceremonies to a true comprehension of the spirit of the Gospels, exaggerated the application of this sentence.

The dogmatic condemnation of the existence of the Antipodes long arrested man in his search for that fourth quarter of the world whose inhabitants should have their feet directed towards ours. It was one of the principal obstacles which Columbus was called upon to surmount in the realisation of his sublime idea. When cited before the Council of Salamanca,—composed of prelates and men of science,—he had to meet the revived objection of Lactantius, a Christian apologist of the third century:[39]—"Can there be anything more absurd than a belief in the existence of Antipodes, of inhabitants with their feet opposite to our feet, of people who walk with their feet in the air, and their heads on the ground?—that there is a part of the world where everything is inverted, where trees throw out their branches from top to bottom, while it rains, and hails, and snows, from bottom to top?"

Columbus admirably demonstrated, from an artificial globe, that flies walked as easily on the lower as on the upper surface, and hence pointed out that men, compared with the size of the earth, are much smaller still than flies. But his judges persisted in their conviction, and did not fail to cast in his face the jesting words of Plutarch: "Philosophers, rather than renounce a favourite hypothesis, would make human beings crawl on the lower face of the earth like worms or lizards." But it was principally the authority of St Augustine which they invoked to condemn a belief in the Antipodes. St Augustine had declared such a belief incompatible with the dogmas of the faith; for to admit the existence of inhabitable lands, in the opposite hemisphere, would be to admit the existence of peoples not descended from Adam, since it would have been impossible for him to traverse the ocean lying between Asia and the Antipodes!

Some authorities denied the Antipodes on the ground taken by certain classic writers, that the regions of the opposite hemisphere were uninhabitable under the tropics, on account of the extreme heat, and near the Poles, on account of the extreme cold. Others cited Epicurus, affirming that the earth was inhabitable and roofed with a celestial vault only in our western hemisphere, the other half being an inaccessible chaos. Others pretended that no traveller could reach the east by way of the west, because the earth, being pear-shaped, he would encounter on his road an insurmountable tuberosity,—undoubtedly the tail or stalk of the pear! Finally, there were some who dwelt upon the magnitude of the earth, whose circuit would occupy a voyage of upwards of three years.