# Popular Science Monthly/Volume 41/August 1892/New Chapters in the Warfare of Science: Geography I

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* NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE.
XVII.—GEOGRAPHY.
By ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, LL. D., L. H. D.,
EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY.
PART I.
1. The Form of the Earth.—Among various rude tribes we find survivals of a primitive idea that the earth is a flat table or disk, ceiled, domed, or canopied by the sky, and that the sky rests upon the mountains as pillars. Such a belief is entirely natural; it conforms to the appearance of things, and hence has entered into various theologies.
In the early civilizations of Egypt and Chaldea it was very fully developed. The Egyptians considered the earth as a table, flat and oblong, the sky being its ceiling; a huge "firmament" of metal. At the four corners of the earth were the pillars supporting this firmament, and on this solid sky were the "waters above the heavens." They believed that, when chaos was taking form, one of the gods by main force raised the waters on high and spread them out over the firmament; that on the under side of this solid vault or ceiling or firmament the stars were suspended to light the earth, and that the rains were caused by the letting down of the waters through its windows. This idea and others connected with it seem to have taken strong hold of the Egyptian priestly caste, thus entering into their theology and sacred science: ceilings of great temples, with stars, constellations, planets, and signs of the zodiac figured upon them, remain to-day as striking evidences of this.
In India and Persia we have theories of geography based upon similar conceptions and embalmed in sacred texts. The Chaldeans also believed that a firmament was spread out over the earth, and that it supported the ocean of celestial waters, from which fell dew and rain.
From these sources came geographical legacies to the Hebrews: ​various passages in their sacred books, many of them most noble in conception, and most beautiful in form, regarding the "firmament," the "corners of the earth," the "pillars of heaven," the "waters above the firmament," and the "windows of heaven," point us back to these ancient springs of thought.
But as civilization was developed, there were evolved, especially among the Greeks, ideas of the earth's sphericity. The Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle especially cherished them. These ideas were vague, they were mixed with absurdities, but they were germ ideas, and even amid the luxuriant growth of theology in the early Christian Church these germs began struggling into life in the minds of a few thinking men, and these men renewed the suggestion that the earth is a globe.
A few of the larger-minded fathers of the Church, influenced possibly by Pythagorean traditions, but certainly by Aristotle and Plato, were willing to accept this view, but the majority of them took fright at once. To them it seemed fraught with dangers to Scripture, by which, of course, they meant their ​interpretation of Scripture. Among the first who took up arms against it was Eusebius. In view of the New Testament texts indicating the immediately approaching end of the world, he endeavored to turn off this idea by bringing scientific studies into contempt. Speaking of investigators, he said, "It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them, but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to better things." Basil of Cæsarea declared it "a matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan." Lactantius referred to the ideas of those studying astronomy as "bad and senseless," and opposed the doctrine of the earth's sphericity both from Scripture and reason. St. John Chrysostom also exerted his influence against this scientific belief; and Ephrem Syrus, the greatest man of the old Syrian Church, widely known as the "lute of the Holy Ghost," opposed it no less earnestly.
But the strictly Biblical men of science, such eminent fathers and bishops as Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, Clement of Alexandria in the third, and others in centuries following, were not content with merely opposing what they stigmatized as an old heathen theory; they drew from their Bibles a new Christian theory, to which one church authority added one idea and another another, until it was fully developed. Taking the survival of various early traditions, given in the seventh verse of the first chapter of Genesis, they dwelt on the scriptural declaration that the earth was, at creation, arched over with a solid vault, "a firmament," and to this they added the passage from Isaiah in which it is declared that the heavens are stretched out "like a curtain," and again "like a tent to dwell in." The universe, then, is like a house: the earth is its ground floor, the firmament its ceiling, under which the Almighty hangs out the sun to rule the day, and the moon and stars to rule the night. This ceiling is also the floor of the apartment above, and in this is a cistern, shaped, as one of the authorities says, "like a bathing-tank," and containing "the waters which are above the firmament."
These waters are let down upon the earth by the Almighty and his angels through the "windows of heaven." As to the movement of the sun, there was a citation of various passages in Genesis, mixed with metaphysics in various proportions, and this was thought to give ample proofs from the Bible that the earth could not be a sphere.
​In the sixth century this development of theory culminated in what was nothing less than a complete and detailed system of the universe, claiming to be based upon Scripture, its author being the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes. Egypt was a great treasure-house of theologic thought to various religions of antiquity, and Cosmas appears to have urged upon the early Church this Egyptian idea of the construction of the world, just as another Egyptian ecclesiastic, Athanasius, urged upon the Church the Egyptian triune idea of the gods ruling the world. According to Cosmas, the earth is a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas. It is four hundred days' journey long and two hundred broad. At the outer edges of these four seas arise massive walls closing in the whole structure and supporting the firmament or vault of the heavens, whose edges are cemented to the walls. These walls inclose the earth and all the heavenly bodies.
The whole of this theologic-scientific structure was built most carefully and, as was then thought, most scripturally. Starting with the expression applied in the ninth chapter of Hebrews to the tabernacle in the desert, Cosmas insists, with other interpreters of his time, that it gives the key to the whole construction of the world. The universe is, therefore, made on the plan of the Jewish tabernacle—box-like and oblong. Going into details, he quotes the sublime words of Isaiah: "It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth; . . . that stretcheth out the heavens like a curtain, and spreadeth them out like a tent to dwell in"; and the passage in Job, which speaks of the "pillars of heaven." He works all this into his system, and reveals, as he thinks, treasures of science.
This vast box is divided into two compartments, one above the other. In the first of these, men live and stars move; and it extends up to the first solid vault, or firmament, above which live the angels, a main part of whose business it is to push and pull the sun and planets to and fro. Next, he takes the text, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters," and other texts from Genesis; to these he adds the text from the Psalms, "Praise him, ye heaven of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens"; then casts all these growths of thought into his crucible together, and finally brings out the theory that over this first vault is a vast cistern containing "the waters." He then takes the expression in Genesis regarding the "windows of heaven" and establishes a doctrine regarding the regulation of the rain, to the effect that the angels not only push and pull the heavenly bodies to light the earth, but also open and close the heavenly windows to water it.
To understand the surface of the earth, Cosmas studies the table of show-bread in the Jewish tabernacle. The surface of this ​table proves to liiin that the earth is flat, and its dimensions prove that the earth is twice as long as broad; its four corners symbolize the four seasons; the twelve loaves of bread, the twelve months; the hollow about the table proves that the ocean surrounds the earth. To account for the movement of the sun, Cosmas suggests that at the north of the earth is a great mountain, and that at night the sun is carried behind this; but some of the commentators ventured to express a doubt here; they thought that the sun was pushed into a great pit at night and pulled out in the morning.
Nothing can be more touching in its simplicity than Cosmas's summing up of his great argument. He declares, "We say therefore with Isaiah that the form of the heaven that embraces the universe is that of a vault, with Job that it is joined to the earth, and with Moses that the length of the earth is greater than its breadth." The treatise closes with rapturous assertions that not only Moses and the prophets, but also angels and apostles, agree to the truth of his doctrine, and that at the last day God will condemn all who do not accept it.
Although this theory was universally considered as drawn from Scripture, it was really, as we have seen, the result of an evolution of theological thought begun long before the texts on which it nominally rested were written. It was not at all strange that Cosmas, Egyptian as he was, should have received this old Nile-born doctrine, as we see it indicated to-day in the structure of Egyptian temples, and that he should have developed it by the aid of the Jewish Scriptures. But the theological world knew nothing of its more remote pagan evolution; it was received as virtually inspired, and was soon regarded as a fortress of scriptural truth. Some of the foremost men in the Church devoted themselves to buttressing it with new texts and throwing about it new outworks of theological reasoning; the great body of the faithful considered it a direct gift from the Almighty.
​From this old conception of the universe as a sort of house, with heaven as its upper story and the earth as its ground floor, flowed important theological ideas into heathen, Jewish, and Christian mythologies. Common to them all are legends regarding attempts of mortals to invade the upper apartment from the lower. Of such are the Greek legends of the Aloidae who sought to reach heaven by piling up mountains, and were cast down; the Chaldean and Hebrew legends of the wicked who at Babylon sought to build "a tower whose top may reach heaven," which Jehovah went down from heaven to see, and which he brought to naught by the "confusion of tongues"; the Hindoo legend of the tree which sought to grow into heaven and which Brahma blasted; and the Mexican legend of the giants who sought to reach heaven by building the Pyramid of Cholula, and who were overthrown by fire from above.
Myths having this geographical idea as their germ developed in luxuriance through thousands of years. Ascensions to heaven and descents from it, "translations," "assumptions," "annunciations," mortals "caught up" into it and returning, angels flying between it and the earth, thunderbolts hurled down from it, mighty winds issuing from its corners, voices speaking from the upper floor to men on the lower, temporary openings of the floor of heaven to reveal the blessedness of the good, "signs and wonders" hung out from it to warn the wicked, interventions of every kind, from the heathen gods coming down on every sort of errand, and Jehovah coming down to walk in Eden in the cool of the day, to St. Mark swooping down into the market-place of Venice to break the shackles of a slave—all these are but features in a vast evolution of myths arising largely from this geographical germ.
Nor did this evolution end here. Naturally, in this view of things, if heaven was a loft, hell was a cellar; and if there were ascensions into one, there were descents into the other. Hell being so near, interferences by its occupants with the dwellers of the earth just above were constant and form a vast chapter in medieval literature. Dante made this conception of the location of hell still more vivid, and we find some forms of it serious barriers to geographical investigation. Many a bold navigator, who was quite ready to brave pirates and tempests, trembled at the thought of tumbling with his ship into one of the openings into hell which a wide-spread belief placed in the Atlantic at some unknown distance from Europe. This terror of the sailors was one of the main obstacles in the great voyage of Columbus. In an
​Anglo-Saxon tract, giving science the form of a dialogue, occur the following question and answer: "Why is the sun so red in the evening?" "Because he looketh down upon hell."
But the ancient germ of scientific truth in geography still lived, and a hundred years after Cosmas it gets new life from a great churchman of southern Europe, Isidore of Seville, who, however fettered by the dominant theology in many other things, braved it in this. In the eighth century a similar declaration is made in the north of Europe by another great church authority, Bede. Against the new life thus given to the old truth, the sacred theory struggled long and vigorously but in vain. Eminent authorities in later ages, like Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Vincent of Beauvais, felt obliged to accept the doctrine of the earth's sphericity, and as we approach the modern period we find its truth acknowledged by the vast majority of thinking men.
2. The Delineation of the Earth.—Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the center of the earth.
The Chaldeans held that their "holy house of the gods" was the center. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the center of it, Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindoos, it was Mount Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned, Olympus or the temple at Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the "middle kingdom." It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the center of the world to be Jerusalem.
The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout the "ages of faith" this was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth's form. St. Jerome, the greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem must stand at the earth's center; in the ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument; in the eleventh century, Hugh of St. Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade, declared, "Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth"; ​in the thirteenth century, another of the mediæval Church authorities, Cæsar of Heisterbach, declared, "As the heart in the midst of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited earth"; "so it was that Christ was crucified at the center of the earth." Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty and wedded it to immortal verse.
Ezekiel's statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of Andrea Bianco, Marino Sanuto, and a multitude of others fixed this view in men's minds, and doubtless helped during many generations to discourage any scientific statements tending to unbalance this geographical center supposed to be revealed in Scripture.
Nor did mediæval thinkers rest with this conception. In accordance with the dominant view that physical truth must be sought by theological reasoning, the idea was evolved that not only the site of the cross on Calvary marked the geographical center of the world, but that on this very spot had stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit in Eden. Thus was geography made to reconcile all parts of the great theologic plan. This doctrine was hailed with joy by multitudes; and we find in the works of mediæval pilgrims to Palestine, again and again, ​evidence that this had become precious truth to them, both in theology and geography.
Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way from our sacred writings into mediæval map-making; two others were almost as marked.
First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and Magog. Few passages in the Old Testament are more sublime than the denunciation of these great enemies by Ezekiel; and the well-known statement in the Apocalypse fastened the Hebrew feeling regarding them with a new meaning into the mind of the early Church: hence it was that the mediæval map-makers took great pains to delineate these monsters and their habitations on the maps. For centuries no map was considered orthodox which did not show them.
The second conception was derived from the frequent mention in our sacred books of the "four winds." Hence came a vivid belief in their real existence and their delineation on the maps, generally as colossal heads with distended cheeks, blowing vigorously toward Jerusalem.
Even at a period after these conceptions had mainly disappeared we find here and there evidences of the difficulty men found in giving up the scriptural idea of direct personal interference by agents of Heaven in the ordinary phenomena of Nature: thus in a noted map of the sixteenth century representing the earth as a sphere, there is at each pole a crank, with an angel laboriously turning the earth by means of it.
* ↑ For survivals of the early idea, among the Eskimos, of the sky as supported by mountains, and, among sundry Pacific islanders, of the sky as a firmament or vault of stone, see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, second edition, London, 1870, chap, xi; Spencer, Sociology, vol. i, chap, viii; also Andrew Lang, La Mythologie, Paris, 1886, pp. 68-73. For the early view in India and Persia, see citations from the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. i. For the Egyptian view, see Champollion; also, Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, Maspero, and others. As to the figures of the heavens upon the ceilings of Egyptian temples, see Maspero, Archéologie Egyptienne, Paris, 1890; and for engravings of them, see Lepsius, Denkmaler, vol. i, Bl. 41, and vol. ix, Abth. iv, Bl. 35; also the Description de l'Égypte published by order of Napoleon, tome ii, PI. 14; also Prisse'd'Avennes, Art Égyptien, Atlas, tome i, PI. 35; and especially for a survival at the Temple of Denderah, see Denon, Voyage en Egypte, Planches 129, 130. For the Egyptian idea of "pillars of heaven," as alluded to on the stele of Victory of Thotmes III, in the Cairo Museum, see Ebers, Uarda, ii, 175, note, Leipsic, 1877. For a similar Babylonion belief, see Sayce's Herodotus, Appendix, 403. For the belief of Hebrew scriptural writers in a solid "firmament," see especially Job, xxxviii, 18; also Smith's Bible Dictionary.
* ↑ The agency of the Pythagoreans in first spreading the doctrine of the earth's sphericity is generally acknowledged, but the first clear and full utterance of it to the world was by Aristotle. Very fruitful, too, was the statement of the new theory given by Plato in the Timseus; see Jowett's translation, New York edition, 62, c. Also Phædo, pp. 449 et seq. See also Grote on Plato's doctrine of the sphericity of the earth; also Sir G. C. Lewis's Astronomy of the Ancients, London, 1862, chap, iii, section i, and note. Cicero's mention of the antipodes, and his reference to the passage in the Timasus are even more remarkable than the original, in that they much more clearly foreshadow the modern doctrine. See his Academic Questions, ii; also Tusc. Quest, i and v, 24. For a very full summary of the views of the ancients on the sphericity of the earth, see Kretchmer, Die physische Erdkunde im christlichen Mittelalter, Wien, 1889, pp. 35 et seq.; also, Eicken, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, Stuttgart, 1887, Dritter Theil, chap. vi. For citations and summaries, see Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, vol. i, p. 189, and St. Martin, Hist, de la Géog., Paris, 1873, p. 96; also, Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, Firenze, 1851, chapter xii, pp. 184 et seq.
* ↑ For Eusebius, see the Prcep. Ev., xv, 61. For Basil, see the Hexameron, Horn, ix, cited in Peschel, Erdkunde, p. 96, note. For Lactantius, see his Inst. Div., lib. iii, cap. 3; also, citations in Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, London, 185*7, vol. i, p. 194, and in St. Martin, Histoire de la Geographie, pp. 216, 217. For the views of St. John Chrysostom Eph. Syrus, and other great churchmen, see Kretschmer as above, chap. i.
* ↑ For a notice of the views of Cosmas in connection with those of Lactantius, Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, and others, see Schoell, Histoire de la Litterature Grecque, vol. vii, p. 3*7. The main scriptural passages referred to are as follows: (1) Isaiah xl, 22; (2) Genesis i, 6; (3) Genesis vii, 11; (4) Exodus xxiv, 10; (5) Job xxvi, 11, and xxxvii, 18; (6) Psalm cxlviii, 4, and civ, 9; (7) Ezekiel i, 22-26. For Cosmas's theory see Montfaucon, Collectio Nova Patrum, Paris, 1706, vol. ii, p. 188; also pp. 298, 299. The text is illustrated with engravings showing walls and solid vault (firmament), with the whole apparatus of "fountains of the great deep," "windows of heaven," angels, and the mountain behind which the sun is drawn. For reduction of one of them see Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde, p. 98; also article "Maps," in Knight's Dictionary of Mechanics, New York, 1875. For a good discussion of Cosmas's ideas, see Santarem, Hist, de la Cosmographie, vol. ii, pp. 8 et seq., and for a very thorough discussion of its details, Kretschmer, as above. For still another theory, very droll, and thought out on similar principles, see Mungo Park, cited in De Morgan, Paradoxes, 309. For Cosmas's joyful summing up, see Montfaucon) Collectio Nova Patrum, vol. ii, p. 255. For the Egyptian Trinitarian views, see Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. i, pp. 94, 102.
* ↑ For a discussion of the geographical views of Isidore and Bede, see Santarem, Cosmographie, vol. i, pp. 22-24. For the gradual acceptance of the idea of the earth's sphericity after the eighth century, see Kretschmer, pp. 51 et seq., where citations from a multitude of authors are given.
* ↑ For the beliefs of various nations of antiquity that the earth's center was in their most sacred place, see citations from Maspero, Charton, Sayce, and others in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. iv. As to the Greeks, we have typical statements in the Eumenides of Æschylus, where the stone on the altar at Delphi is repeatedly called "the earth's navel"—which is precisely the expression used regarding Jerusalem in the Septuagint translation of Ezekiel (see note below). The proof texts on which the mediæval geographers mainly relied as to the form of the earth were 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 terræ", and the second reads, in the Vulgate, "in medio terræ," and in the Septuagint, ἐπὶ τὸν ὸμφαλὸν τῆς γῆς. That the literal center of the earth was understood, 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 Rabanus Maurus, see his De Universo, lib. xii, cap. 4, in Migne, tome cxi, p. 339. For Hugh of St. Victor, see his De Situ Terrarum, cap. ii. For Dante's belief, see Inferno, canto xxxiv, 112-115: "E se' or sotto l'emisperio giunto, Ch' è opposito a quel che la gran secca Coverchia, e sotto il cui colmo consunto Fu l'uom che nacque e visse senza pecca." For orthodox geography in the middle ages, see Wright's Essays on Archaeology, vol. ii, chapter on the map of the world in Hereford Cathedral; also the rude maps in Cardinal'd'Ailly's Ymago Mundi; also copy of maps of Marino Sanuto and others in Peschel, Erdkunde, p. 210; also Miinster, Fac Simile dell' Atlante de Andrea Bianco, Venezia, 1869. And for discussions of the whole subject, see Santarem, vol. ii, p. 295, vol. iii, pp. 71, 183, 184, and elsewhere. For a brief summary with citations, see Eicken, Geschichte, etc., pp. 622, 623.
* ↑ For the site of the cross on Calvary, as the point where stood "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" in Eden, at the center of the earth, see various Eastern travelers cited in Tobler; but especially the travels of Bishop Arculf in the Holy Land in Wright's Early Travels in Palestine, p. 8; also, Travels of Saewulf, ibid., p. 38; also, Sir John Maundeville, ibid., pp. 166, 167; and for one narrative in which the idea was developed into an amazing mass of pious myths, see Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel, edited by Sir C. W. Wilson, London, 1885, p. 14. (The passage deserves to be quoted as an example of myth-making; it is as follows: "At the time of our Lord's crucifixion, when he gave up the ghost on the cross, the veil of the temple was rent, and the rock above Adam's skull opened, and the blood and water which flowed from Christ's side ran down through the fissure upon the skull, thus washing away the sins of men.")
* ↑ For Gog and Magog, see Ezekiel, chaps, xxxviii and xxxix, and Rev. xx, 8; and for the general subject, Toy, Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 373, 374. For maps showing these two great terrors, and for geographical discussion regarding them, see Lelewel, Geog. du Moyen Age, Bruxelles, 1850, Atlas; also Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 78, 79; also Peschel's Abhandlungen, pp. 28-35, and Gesch. der Erdkunde, p. 210. For representations on maps of the "Four Winds," see Charton, Voyageurs, tome ii, p. 11; also Ruge as above, pp. 324, 325; also, for a curious mixture of the scriptural four winds with the classical winds issuing from the bags of Æolus, see a map of the twelfth century in Leon Gautier, La Chevalerie, p. 153; and for maps showing additional winds, see various editions of Ptolemy. For a map with angels turning the earth by means of cranks at the poles, see Grynæus, Novus Orbis, Basileæ, 1537.