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 GEOGRAPHY

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GEOGRAPHY

and natural history of India. At the same time more frequent visits were made to Nortliern Africa and Abyssinia ; and towards the middle of the fourteenth century settlements were made in the Canary Isles.

However, the immense tracts of land in the interior of Asia were soon closed again to scientific investiga- tion. With the fall of the Mongol djniasty, which had been favourably disposed to Christians, China became forbidden ground to Europeans. But the East re- mained the goal of Western trade, to which the mis- sions had shown the way. The rich lands on the In- dian Ocean remained open, and henceforth they were the objective point of all the great exploring expe- ditions, undertaken by the sea-loving Portuguese, which culminated in the discovery of America by Co- hnnbus. It is well known how much these under- takings were furthered by the all-pervading idea of spreading Christianity. The main object of Henry the Na\'igator in ecjuipping his fleet with the revenues of the Order of Christ was the conversion of the heathen. He was working to the same purpose on the continent of Africa, where he sought to establish com- munications with the Christian ruler of Abyssinia. His efforts led to the circumnavigation of Africa by his successors, and to the systematic exploration of the highland states of East Africa begun by Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century. Columbus, too, was regarded in his time as pre-eminently the en- voy of the Church. Furthermore, the strange results expected from his expedition and his own projects were the last echo of all the aspirations of medieval Christendom, which contemplated a way to the Kings of Cathay (China) whose disposition to embrace Christianity had been repeatedly emphasized by Tos- canelli, as well as the discovery of the Earthly Para- dise, which Columbus placed somewhere near the gulf of Paria, the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre by means of the treasures he expected to find, and, finally, the extension of the Kingdom of Ood over the entire earth before the approaching end of the world.

II. — Philosophical speculation also had asharein the magnificent success that crowned the practical work of the Middle Ages. Although geography as a science for its own sake was no more the chief purpose of this speculation than exploration for its own sake was that of the missionaries, it had arrived at truths that are admitted to-day, even when tested by the light of modern research — truths that must be recognized as real progress. As might be expected, in the early centuries of the Church men strove above all things to reconcile deductions from the observation of the facts of nature with the beliefs that were then supposed to be taught in Holy Scripture. The earliest Christian literature was so predominantly exegetical that the teachings of the ancients were always tested in order to see whether they were in harmony with Holy Writ. Hence it was that several of the Fathers pronounced in favour of the theory of the flatness of the earth's surface which had been put forward in later Roman cosmographies. Among the advocates of thLs error were Theodore of Mopsuestia, St. John Chrj-sostom, Severian of Gabala, Procopius of Gaza, and others. Cosmas Indicopleustes advanced an especially gro- tesque elaboration of this doctrine. In his exagger- atedly narrow interpretation of the phraseology of Holy Writ he claimed that the world was constructed in the shape of the Tabernacle of the Covenant in the Old Testament. But long before his day there w'ere men who believed in the sphericity of the earth. It was recognized by Clement and Origen; Ambrose and Basil also upheld it. Gregory of Nyssa e\-en sought to explain the origin of the earth by means of a physical experiment, and advanced hypotheses that come very close to the modern theories of rotation. Augustine declared that the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth in no way conflicted with Holy Writ, and later authors, especially the Venerable Bede, also at- VI.— 29

tempted to prove it on scientific grounds. For a con- siderable period the question of the Antipodes was be- set with controversy. It was absolutely denied by Lactantius and several others, principally on religious grounds, as the people of the Antipodes could not have been saved. The learned Irishman, Bishop Virgilius, patron .saint of Salzburg (d. 7S4) was the first to openly express the opinion that there were men living beyond the ocean. Individual physiographical phenomena also began to come under the observation of the learned, such as the influence of the moon on the titles, the erosive action of the sea, the circulation of water, the origin of hot springs and volcanoes, the di- vision of land and water, the position of the sun at dif- ferent latitudes. The learning and opinions of the first few hundred years were comprehensively set forth in the tremendous work of Isidore of Seville (d. G.36), the " Ktjnnologis " or "Origines", which for a long time enjoyed unlimited authority. During the next few centuries, which were comparatively barren of lit- erarj' achievements, the only men to attain any celeb- rity, besides Bede and Virgilius of Salzburg, were the anonJ^nous geographer of Ravenna (c. 070), the Irish monk Dicuil, author of the well-known "Liber de mensura Orbis terrse" (c. 825), and the learned Pope Sylvester (999-100.3), otherwise known as Gerbert of Aurillac, the most illustrious astronomer of his cen- tury. The oldest cartographic documents we have also date from the same period. They rely for their information on the earth's surface substantially on the Roman methods of delineation. The lost map of the world as known to the Romans can now be recon- structed only by means of the meilieval Mappa mundi; consequently, they exliibit all the deficiencies of the motlel they followed ; they are circular in plan and were drawn neither on projection nor according to scale, the boundaries of the provinces being indicated by straight lines. The central point was in the .'Fgean Sea; at the time of the Crusades it was trans- ferred to Jerusalem, the East being at the top of the maps. In addition to adhering to the Roman form, these maps have preservetl for us also the contents of the Roman maps ; and therein lies the principal value of these interesting documents. They were often draughted with the greatest and most artistic care. Especial importance attaches to the map of the world made by the Spanish monk Beatus. Numerous copies of this show the entire area of the globe as known in 770 after Christ. Of the big wall maps only those in the cathedral at Hereford and the nimnery at Ebsdorf have survived. Both of them are of the latter half of the thirteenth century and are representative of the ancient tj-pe of map. Small atlases were largely cir- culated in cosmographical codices. These are known as Macrobius atlases. Zone atlases, Ranulf atlases, and so forth. Special maps have also come down to us ; tW'O of them, showing south-eastern Europe with Western Asia and Palestine are even attributed to St. Jerome. There is a representation of Palestine in mosaic in the church at Madaba; this dates from the middle of the sixth centurj*. The English monk, Matthew Paris, draughted some modern maps in the thirteenth century which were quite free from the in- fluence of Ptolemy and the Arabians.

But geographical problems made great and unex- pected progress when they received a more scientific basis. This basis was provided by the scholastics when they made the Aristotelean system the starting- point of all their philosophical researches. Their thorough logical training and their strict critical method gave to the work of these commentators on Aristotle the value of original research, which strove to comprehend the entire contemporary science of na- ture. As at the same time the Almagest of Ptolemy was brought to light again by the presbj'ter, Gerard of Cremona (1114-S7), there was not a single problem of mo<lern physical and mathematical geography the