Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/251

Rh a voyage for geographical discovery was undertaken, under the patronage of a king, Pharaoh Necho of Egypt. This monarch engaged a company of Tyrians to circumnavigate Africa. Setting out by the Red Sea, these voyagers sailed southward until autumn, when they landed and sowed corn, and waited for it to ripen. Reaping their crop, they set sail again, and in this manner, having consumed two years, in the third year they turned the pillars of Hercules and came back to Egypt. They asserted, said Herodotus, that which he could not believe, though others might, that, in sailing around Libya, they had the sun on the right hand. The arguments for and against the actuality of this voyage need not here be given. Suffice it that it was not an impossible achievement for mariners of that age; and that Eratosthenes, one of the earliest geographers, represented Libya as circumnavigable.

Accustomed as we are to-day to think of all science as of modern development, most men are content to have read a summary of the "Erdkunde," to have followed Humboldt in his principal researches, and to have formed some acquaintance with Buffon, and Zimmermann, and Blumenbach. If, besides, they know something of Malte-Brun, they think they have compassed the history of the science. A hundred years ago there was no such feeling. The vast advances of this century had not been made. Scholars were not far enough removed from the Renaissance to have lost all reverence for the ancients; and, although they no longer turned to Ptolemy for information, they had a lingering affection for the work which had been the geographical authority down to two hundred years before their day. Elaborate works were written in exposition of the ancient systems, with a patience that would hardly be exercised to-day. The father of such study was D'Anville; but perhaps no single work upon the subject is of more value to us than that of M. Gosselin. In our sketch we have made large use of this work.

Tradition takes us back to days when men thought of the earth as a flat disk, covered with the arching vault of the skies, whose edges rested upon far-off giant pillars; and even to the time when they believed that the earth rested upon elephants, who stood on the back of a tortoise, who in turn were encompassed in the folds of a serpent; but those were not the days of science. The first among the Greeks to teach the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was Thales ( 640). He held that the equator was cut obliquely by the ecliptic, and he divided the earth into five zones. His successor was Anaximander, who also taught that the earth was a sphere (Diogenes Laertius), though some said (Plutarch) that he called it a column. The latter statement could hardly be true, as he was sufficiently scientific to erect at Lacedæmon a gnomon for observing the solstices and equinoxes,