Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/513

 Italy, which, after Honorius ( 404) made Ravenna the capital of the Western Empire, became very active, but the cartographical labors of this school appear to have been limited to the production of descriptive itineraries or painted route-maps. The authority of Ptolemy, during this period, declined. The Alexandrine geographers, no doubt, were better acquainted than he was with Asia, and knew the gross errors he had made in the configuration of countries and the position of places. But there was another and more potent cause that led to the discrediting of Ptolemy, as well as of all the ancient geographers. This was the disposition of the clergy, who for some centuries afterward



were the only learned class, to test all geographical knowledge by the standard of the Bible; and, as the Bible afforded no authority for the opinion of the ancient geographers that the earth is a globe, their ideas and their works were generally rejected as contrary to Holy Writ. In the middle of the sixth century Cosmos, who had been a merchant, an extensive traveler, and who afterward became a monk, was the writer of several geographical works, one of which has survived, in which he maintained that the idea of the earth being a globe was contrary alike to the Scriptures and to common sense; sustaining his views by ingenious arguments, which, in that age, were very convincing. Cosmos was not an ignorant man; on the contrary, his account of the countries with which he was acquainted was accurate and valuable, and it was his topographical knowledge which made him so formidable an antagonist in disputing the rotundity of the earth. "There are," he says, "false Christians, contemners of the authority of Scripture, who dare to maintain that the earth is a sphere. I combat this error, derived from the Greeks, by citations from Holy Writ." He then ridicules the idea that the earth revolves in space without axis, or anything to support it, and characterizes the belief of antipodes, or people living on the other side of a round globe, as old