Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/470

454 that this had become precious truth to them, both in theology and geography.

Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way from our sacred writings into mediæval map-making; two others were almost as marked.

First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and Magog. Few passages in the Old Testament are more sublime than the denunciation of these great enemies by Ezekiel; and the well-known statement in the Apocalypse fastened the Hebrew feeling regarding them with a new meaning into the mind of the early Church: hence it was that the mediæval map-makers took great pains to delineate these monsters and their habitations on the maps. For centuries no map was considered orthodox which did not show them.

The second conception was derived from the frequent mention in our sacred books of the "four winds." Hence came a vivid belief in their real existence and their delineation on the maps, generally as colossal heads with distended cheeks, blowing vigorously toward Jerusalem.

Even at a period after these conceptions had mainly disappeared we find here and there evidences of the difficulty men found in giving up the scriptural idea of direct personal interference by agents of Heaven in the ordinary phenomena of Nature: thus in a noted map of the sixteenth century representing the earth as a sphere, there is at each pole a crank, with an angel laboriously turning the earth by means of it.