Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/512

 the destruction of everything was so great that, when it closed, there was little remaining but fragments of the ancient civilization. This was followed by a period of repose, ignorance, and torpor, to which succeeded another period, ending about the beginning of the fifteenth century, during which a limited few were slowly recovering a portion of the geographical knowledge that had been lost, and dimly groping their way to a true conception of the earth's form and laws.



But, though geographical knowledge declined during this interval, and from the sixth to the middle of the eleventh century the condition in Europe, except in Spain and in Ireland, was one of almost universal ignorance, there was throughout the whole of the period some attention, at least, given to geography—to the study of maps and to map-making. It was, it is true, very little, and the greater part of it tended more to obscure than to enlighten; but at no time was the interest in the subject wholly extinct. For several centuries after the time of Ptolemy, or up to the separation of the eastern from the western half of the Roman Empire, there was an almost uninterrupted study of geography in the schools of Alexandria, in which the fathers of the Church, the philosophers, the soldiers, and the emperors appear to have taken a warm interest. The maps then in use were itineraries or road-maps, which were very numerous, as they were of service to the soldiers during the wars that were then and which continued long afterward to be waged. In addition to these route-maps, general maps were also constructed, to show at a glance the form and proportions of the habitable globe; and in the fifth century Theodosius II. caused a survey to be made of the provinces of the empire, which occupied fifteen years, from which a large map of the empire was compiled. There was also a geographical school at Ravenna, in