Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/545

Rh appears from the ornamentation of the globe that forms part of the insignia of royalty. Mariuus of Tyre (about 150 A.D.) was the first who sought to give effect to the demand made by Hipparchus fur a trustworthy representation of the countries of the world. His work unfortunately has been lost ; and we know of its existence only from his successor Claudius Ptolemy. Without Marinus, however, Ptolemy s work would have been impossible ; and neither of them was able really to carry out Hipparchus s idea of determining the latitude and longitude for every place ; for observa tions of latitude were known only for Marseilles, Syene, Alexandria, Rhodes, and perhaps a few other places, and all other positions were obtained by reducing distances to degrees. The determination of longitudes was even more difficult. Ptolemy possessed only the contemporary observation of the lunar eclipse in Arbela and Carthage of the year 331 B.C., from which he calculated a dif ference of meridian of 45 10 instead of 34 2. The longer axis of the Mediterranean was consequently a third too great, 62 degrees of the meridian being assumed instead of 41 j, and from this there resulted an exaggera tion of all the Mediterranean countries, which was corrected only by the compass-maps of the later Middle Ages. Ptolemy, however (availing himself of the stereographic projection devised by Hipparchus), corrected an important blunder which Marinus had committed through neglecting to take account of the sphericity of the earth and con structing a rectangular system of degrees. Like Marinus, he counted his meridians from the Canaries (the Fortunate Islands). No maps appear to have been drawn by Ptolemy himself; those to be found in the oldest editions of his work are by Agathodaemon (a mathematician of the 5th (?) century after Christ), though accurately based, it is true, on Ptolemy s data. The oldest MS. of Ptolemy is that found in the Vatopedi monastery of Mount Athos, and published by Victor Langlois in 1867 along with careful reproductions -of the maps. It dates from the 12th or 13th century. Besides the exaggeration of the Mediterranean, the greatest blunders of Ptolemy are the following : the European continent between the Black Sea and the Baltic is too narrow ; India is not represented as a peninsula ; Ceylon (Taprobane) is made much too large ; and the Indian Ocean is bounded by lands towards the south (Plate VII.). But in spite of all this the scientific method pursued in the representation was perfectly correct. It was not till the Renaissance that a return was made to the rational treat ment of cartography inaugurated by Ptolemy ; and he then became the teacher of the modern world. 3. Map-making among the Romans. The Romans con tributed nothing to the development of the scientific method of the Greeks, and did not apply astronomy to the purposes of cartography. They valued maps according to their practical utility as implements of political administration ; arid they accordingly attached most importance to the route- map, from which they could learn the roads, the stations, and the distances. If we may judge by the few examples which have been preserved, these sketches may, distortions apart, be compared with our railway maps. Cicero and Seneca mention general and topographical maps. In their time the military routes were already divided into stages, furnished with milestones, and consequently measured. During the reign of Augustus a survey of the whole Roman (Miipire was carried out. The routes were marked on parchment rolls for the purposes of military and civil administration. A map of the world was painted in a (portico at Rome ; a map of Italy was to be seen in the temple of Tellus. Particularly celebrated was Agrippa s map. Pliny must plainly have been in possession of maps to keep himself right in regard to the great number of names which he records. A map of the Roman empire was drawn up under Domitian. The emperors of the 2d, 3d, and 4th centuries caused maps to be constructed and painted on the walls of public buildings in the cities of Gaul, as for example in Augustodunum (Autun) ; but of this class unfortunately none has been preserved. The only Roman map, indeed, of the imperial epoch which has come down to us is the Tabula Peutingeriana, which takes its modern name from Conrad Peutinger of Augsburg, who possessed it in the 16th century. It is now preserved in the Imperial Library of Vienna. Its origin as a map goes back at least to the 3d century of the Christian era, to the time, that is, of Alexander Severus ; but the actual copy is not older than the 13th century. It consists of twelve folio sheets of parchment, which originally formed one long strip. It has been published by Scheyb (1753) and Mannert (1834), and in excellent facsimile by Desjardins (1869, &c.). That the original of this remark able map was of a circular shape has been satisfactorily proved, the pattern followed being that of the map of the world in the portico of the Campus Agripp&amp;lt;T, which for centuries retained the rank of a model. Probably, however, such an orbis jndns was not exactly round, but rather oval. In its. construction effect was also given to the opinion current from the time of Herodotus that the extent of the inhabited world was greater from east to west than from north to south. From this it is clear that the Romans had not advanced beyond the earlier Greek con ception, and were ignorant of the astronomico-mathematical method inaugurated by Hipparchus. 4. Map-making in the Middle Ages. The scholastic Middle Ages confined themselves to imitation of the Roman orbes. Fulness of detail, moreover, was gradually lost, meagreness and crudity appearing in its place. Carto graphy in fact fell back to a second childhood. Fanatical exponents of the orthodox faith, like Lactantius, looked with disdain on all scientific culture. Geographical ques tions were of no interest to him because he regarded them as mere matters of opinion. Astronomy was a piece of fantastic folly, the knowledge of distant lands mere learned lumber. &quot;Quae beatitude,&quot; he exclaims, &quot;erit mihi proposita si sciero unde Nilus oriatur vel quicquid de coeb physici delirant 1 &quot; As this narrow conception of things became on the whole the dominant one, geography and map-making practically ceased to exist. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was placed under the ban of the church, and people went back to the Homeric idea of a disk sur rounded by the ocean. Isidore of Seville (ob. 636) taught: &quot; Orbis a rotunditate circuli dictus quia sicut rota est. Undique enim Oceanus circumfluens ejus in circulo ambit fines. Divisus est autem trifarie ; e quibus una pars Asia, altera Europa, tertia Africa, quae et Libya nnncupatur.&quot; Isidore is a master of false etymological inferences. Deriving rotunditas from rota, a wheel, he declares that consequently the earth has the appearance of a wheel. Hence the name wheel-maps has been given to all those maps of the earlier Middle Ages. The three-fold division which he gives of the world-disk kept its ground for cen turies, and the figure of the earth put on the miserable guise shown in fig. 2. It was only by the Greek fathers that the ! and, as the knowledge of Greek rapidly died out in western j Europe, the fountain was dried up from which a better science might have been derived. Many minor modifica tions were introduced into the map of the world, but the fundamental type remained as given in fig. 2. Jerusalem lay in the centre, Paradise in the extreme east. Clever artists gave life to the disk of the world by turreted pictures of towns Jerusalem, Troy, Babylon, Rome, &c., and drew Adam and Eve in the midst of a Paradise which
 * doctrine of the earth s sphericity continued to be taught;