Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/31

 a passage which, though by no means so distinct as the preceding, speaks of two segments of the habitable globe, one towards the north, the other towards the south pole, and which have the form of a drum. Aratus, Strabo, and Geminus have also handed down a similar opinion, that the torrid zone was occupied throughout its length by the ocean, and that the band of sea divided our continent from another, situated, as they suppose, in the southern hemisphere.

To come down, however, to a later period, the editor is enabled, through the researches of his lamented friend, the late learned and laborious Vicomte de Santarem, to show from early manuscript maps and other geographical monuments, how this belief in the existence of a great southern continent was entertained anterior to the discoveries of the Portuguese in the Pacific Ocean. In his Essai sur l'Histoire de la Cosmographie et de la Cartographie du Moyen Age, vol. i, p. 229, the Vicomte informs us that "Certain cartographers of the middle ages, still continue to represent the Antichthone in their maps of the world in accordance with their belief that, beyond the ocean of Homer, there was an inhabited country, another temperate region, called the "opposite earth," which it was impossible to reach, principally on account of the torrid zone. "The following are the maps of the world which represent this theory:—