His Works Consist
Of Thirty-Seven Books, The First Six Comprise The System Of The World And
The Geography As It Was Then Known.
After examining the accounts of
Polybius, Agrippa, and Artemidorus, he assigns the following comparative
magnitudes to the three great divisions of the earth.
Europe rather more
than a third, Asia about a fourth, and Africa about a fifth of the whole.
With few exceptions, his geographical knowledge of the east and of the
north, the parts of the world of which the ancients were the most ignorant,
was very inaccurate: he supposes the Ganges to be the north-eastern limit
of Asia, and that from it the coast turned to the north, where it was
washed by the sea of Serica, between which and a strait, which he imagined
formed a communication from the Caspian to the Scythian ocean, he admits
but a very small space. According to the system of Pliny, therefore, the
ocean occupied the whole county of Siberia, Mogul Tartary, China, &c. He
derived his information respecting India from the journals of Nearchus, and
the other officers of Alexander; and yet such is his ignorance, or the
corrupt state of the text, or the vitiated medium through which he received
his information, that it is not easy to reconcile his account with that of
Nearchus. Salmasius, indeed, charges him with confounding the east and west
in his description of India. His geography, in the most important
particular of the relative distances of places, is rendered of very little
utility or authority, from the circumstance pointed out and proved by
D'Anville, that he indiscriminately reckons eight stadia to the mile,
without reference to the difference between the Greek and Roman stadium.
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