But No Such Result
Occurred Speedily, Nor Was Its Beneficial Effect Of Any Long Duration.
No doubt several causes contributed to the slowness of its action upon the
notions of Cosmographers, of which the unreal character attributed to the
Book, as a collection of romantic marvels rather than of geographical and
historical facts, may have been one, as Santarem urges.
But the essential
causes were no doubt the imperfect nature of publication before the
invention of the press; the traditional character which clogged geography
as well as all other branches of knowledge in the Middle Ages; and the
entire absence of scientific principle in what passed for geography, so
that there was no organ competent to the assimilation of a large mass of
new knowledge.
Of the action of the first cause no examples can be more striking than we
find in the false conception of the Caspian as a gulf of the Ocean,
entertained by Strabo, and the opposite error in regard to the Indian Sea
held by Ptolemy, who regards it as an enclosed basin, when we contrast
these with the correct ideas on both subjects possessed by Herodotus. The
later Geographers no doubt knew his statements, but did not appreciate
them, probably from not possessing the evidence on which they were based.
[Sidenote: General characteristics of Mediaeval Cosmography.]
80. As regards the second cause alleged, we may say that down nearly to
the middle of the 15th century cosmographers, as a rule, made scarcely any
attempt to reform their maps by any elaborate search for new matter, or by
lights that might be collected from recent travellers. Their world was in
its outline that handed down by the traditions of their craft, as
sanctioned by some Father of the Church, such as Orosius or Isidore, as
sprinkled with a combination of classical and mediaeval legend; Solinus
being the great authority for the former. Almost universally the earth's
surface is represented as filling the greater part of a circular disk,
rounded by the ocean; a fashion that already existed in the time of
Aristotle and was ridiculed by him.[1] No dogma of false geography was
more persistent or more pernicious than this. Jerusalem occupies the
central point, because it was found written in the Prophet Ezekiel: "Haec
dicit Dominus Deus: Ista est Jerusalem, in medio gentium posui eam, et
in circuitu ejus terras;"[2] a declaration supposed to be corroborated by
the Psalmist's expression, regarded as prophetic of the death of Our Lord:
"Deus autem, Rex noster, ante secula operatus est salutem in medio
Terrae" (Ps. lxxiii. 12).[3] The Terrestrial Paradise was represented as
occupying the extreme East, because it was found in Genesis that the Lord
planted a garden east ward in Eden.[4] Gog and Magog were set in the far
north or north-east, because it was said again in Ezekiel: "Ecce Ego
super te Gog Principem capitis Mosoch et Thubal ... et ascendere te faciam
de lateribus Aquilonis," whilst probably the topography of those
mysterious nationalities was completed by a girdle of mountains out of the
Alexandrian Fables.
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