Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/570

552 that the great earth-egg should not be left without some kind of support. To meet this requirement Edrisi, an Arabian geographer of the eleventh century, broached the idea that the earth is like an egg, with one-half plunged in water. According to him, the known world forms only a single half of the egg, which floats in the great ocean like an egg in a basin. This notion got currency with artists and map-makers, and continued, it is said, as a mode of representing the earth for many centuries.



"In a manuscript commentary on the Apocalypse, which is in the library of Turin, is a very curious chart, referred to the tenth, but belonging possibly to the eighth century. It represents the earth as a circular planisphere. The four sides of the earth are each accompanied by a figure of a wind, as a horse on a bellows, from which air is poured out, as well as from a shell in his mouth. Above, or to the east, are Adam and Eve, with the serpent. To their right is Asia, with two very elevated mountains—Cappadocia and Caucasus. Thence comes the river Eusis, and the sea into which it falls forms an arm of the ocean which surrounds the earth. This arm joins the Mediterranean, and separates Europe from Asia. Toward the middle is Jerusalem, with two curious arms of the sea running past it; while to the south there is a long and straight sea in an east and west direction. The various islands of the Mediterranean are put in a square patch, and Rome, France, and Germany, are indicated, while Thula, Britannia, and Scotia, are marked as islands in the northwest of the ocean that surrounds the whole world."