the Southwestern tribes gave it as many stories as the tallest of their public dwellings. The Shoshones said the vault of the sky was a dome of ice against which the rainbow-snake rubbed its back, and the Haida said that the firmament regularly rose and fell, the clouds striking the mountains with an audible noise. According to many Western tribes the canopy of heaven was pierced with holes at the four cardinal points, and these were constantly opening and closing; a sky-world like the earth was beyond, into which swans and shamans could pass. All peoples believed that the earth was immovable, with the sun revolving around it. Many thought it rested on the back of some animal -a buffalo, a tortoise, a catfish.

Sometimes more sophisticated and still more fanciful ideas were entertained. To one school of Greek thought the world was a living being and man himself a microcosm, a little world, as Paracelsus called him. The sun and moon were the two eyes of the world, the earth its body, the ether its intellect, and the sky its wings. It was held that the movements of man and of the world were in exact correspondence; hence astrology, which interprets the one by the other. To the Venerable Bede the universe was an egg, the earth its yolk, the water the white of the egg, the air its membrane, and the encircling fire the shell or cover of all.

Cosmas took literally the utterance of St. Paul that the tabernacle was a figure of the world. In an amazing exercise of ingenuity he found the oblong design, the walls, roof, and floor, the candlesticks, the Ark of the Covenant, and the table of shewbread of this Jewish desert booth all repeated in the shape and furnishings of the universe. His scheme of things has been compared to a traveler's trunk, with its body standing for the earth, the flat tray for the firmament, and the curved lid for the arch of upper heaven. The effects of day and night were produced, Cosmas thought, about as they are on the stage. There was a tall mountain in the north. When the sun went behind it darkness fell; when the sun came out from behind it, there was light. This conception lacks both the intelligence and the poetry of the American Indian myth where the Sun-Carrier is pictured as hanging the sun on a peg on the west wall of his lodge and then unrolling in succession the

robe of dawn, the robe of blue sky, the robe of golden evening light and the robe of darkness.

The sense of symmetry demanded that the earth should have a central point, and each country sought it somewhere in its own borders. Homer thought that this was on Mount Olympus, where the Greek gods dwelt. The Hindus thought that it was on Mount Meru, where their own gods dwelt. The Chinese fixed it on Mount Sumeru on a circle of gold and with the sun and moon revolving around it; this was surrounded by the seven sacred mountains, the seven seas, and the four inhabited continents.

Christian pilgrims said that Jerusalem was in the center of the earth, quoting the Psalm, "For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth." There was a spot not far from the place of Calvary which the Lord had signified and measured, and this was called Compas. It was something pilgrims could see and touch. For eight centuries the legend was current, and for three centuries, until nearly the time of Columbus, it dominated European maps of the world, which were wheel-shaped, with Jerusalem at the hub.

Among the Eastern nations the sources and courses of rivers had sometimes a cosmic significance. They flowed from the center of the earth or from the Terrestrial Paradise. From the Cool Lake which was in the midst of Asia, to the south of the Fragrant Mountains and to the north of the Snowy Mountains, flowed four great rivers, according to the Chinese. The Ganges issued from the eastern side of the lake through the mouth of a silver ox, and found the southeastern sea. The Indus issued from the southern side through the mouth of a golden elephant, and found the southwestern sea. The Oxus issued from the western side through the mouth of a horse of lapis lazuli, and found the northwestern sea. The River of China issued from the northern side through the mouth of a crystal lion, and found the northeastern sea.

In the Genesis story a river goes out of Eden to water the garden and divides into four-Pison, which compasses the golden land of Havilah; Gihon, which compasses Ethiopia; Hiddekel, which goes toward the east of Assyria; and Euphrates. Josephus, the Romanized Jew, assimilated the Hebrew geog

raphy with the Greek account of an Ocean Stream that flowed around the earth. This encircling river, he said, was the source of the four biblical streams. The Arabs also accepted the rivers of Eden and showed ingenuity in tracing their courses to the distant lands where flowed the streams they had identified with them. So did John Marignolli, the fourteenth-century Franciscan traveler.

Paradise, he said, was in Ceylon, about forty miles distant from Adam's Peak, which he visited. On this latter peak was Adam's footprint and the garden he tilled when expelled from the abode of innocence. The Mount of Eden overtopped it, and almost always the mists brooded there, but one could hear the waters falling from the sacred fount out of which the four rivers came. These flowed away from the island of Ceylon by channels under the ocean, the Gihon becoming the Nile, the Pison passing through India and China, and doubling back through the deserts to die in the sands and be born again as the Caspian Sea. With the greater portion of the earth unknown, a curious custom obtained of using definite figures in default of definite facts. Dicuil, the Irish scholar, said that there were 2 seas, 72 islands, 40 mountains, 65 provinces, 281 towns, 55 rivers, and 116 peoples; he had read this in what he called the cosmography of Julius Cæsar and Mark Antony. Idrisi declared that there were 27,000 islands in the Atlantic. Mariners on the Sea of China told Marco Polo that it contained precisely 7,440 islands, mostly inhabited. In the Indian Ocean, he said, there were 12,700 islands. The Koreans had an old tradition that there were fourscore and four thousand several countries upon the earth, but themselves doubted it. The sun could not warm so many lands, they thought. Their real belief was that there were but twelve kingdoms or countries. When the Dutch explorers named other countries to them they laughed; the visitors must be talking of towns and villages.

Sometimes the sense of symmetry, sometimes poetic instinct and the desire for graphic imagery, led men to give the habitable world the outlines of animate or inanimate objects. Strabo likened it to a chlamys, or soldier's cloak. Dionysius Afer said it was like a sling. The California Indians said it was like a mat with the long way north and south. Massoudy

likened it to a bird. The head of the bird was at Mecca and Medina, Africa was its tail, Irak and India its right wing, and the land of Gog and Magog its left wing. Other writers pictured the earth in the semblance of a man, with the head in the southern hemisphere, and the feet or under part in the northern; the right hand was the east, whence began the movement of the primum mobile, and the left the west, whither it trended. As the head was the noblest part, governing the rest of the body, so Ptolemy thought, the southern hemisphere was nobler than the other parts of the earth, and the stars above it were more resplendent and of greater virtue than those of the northern.

The tides were the breath of the living earth, Solinus thought. A large man on the beach of the ocean gets up and sits down twice a day, said the Tahltan Indians of Canada; twice a day a colossal crab comes out of and goes back to its cave at the foot of the world-tree, said the Malays; for six hours a serpent at the rim of the world draws in its breath and for six hours lets it out, said the Scotch islanders-wherefore the tides ebb and flow. The Gauls endowed them with life and attacked them

with weapons.

Ptolemy pictured Great Britain as a Z written backward. Strabo compared Spain to an ox hide. Numantianus likened Italy to an oak leaf. India was thought to be an exact equilateral triangle.

There were conflicting views as to the south. Although by the beginning of the historical period the Sabæans and Phoenicians had gone down the eastern coast of Africa through the Indian Ocean some twenty degrees beyond the equator to seek the gold of Havilah, these ventures into the zone of torrid heat were not for the Atlantic and the peoples of the west. The insidious fictions of the Semitic mariners had awakened their fears. No man, they thought, could live in the lands of vertical sunlight. In what lay beyond these, they had as little interest as men have now in the possible populations of other planets. Europeans of the early Christian era put aside the notion which enlightened Greeks had entertained that there might be "opposite peoples of the south." Assuming the inhuman heat of the torrid zone, it was evident that a tropical people could not be of the race of Adam, and heresy was in the thought of any other lineage.

Lactantius, the Christian Cicero of the third century, is remembered because he gave popular error rhetorical expression and because his words were flung at Columbus twelve centuries afterward, when he appeared before the Council of Salamanca to justify his theory that one might reach the east by sailing west. "Can any one be so foolish," asked Lactantius, "as to believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads, or places where trees may be growing backward or rain falling upward? Where is the marvel of the hanging gardens of Babylon, if we are to allow of a hanging world at the Antipodes?" Pliny had answered him with another question two centuries before. "If any one," he said, "should ask why those situated opposite to us do not fall, we directly ask in return, whether those on the opposite side do not wonder that we do not fall."

Even when the ancient world had accepted the theory that the earth was a sphere, this seemed to it somehow half as long again from east to west as from north to south, and the belief is preserved in the two terms, Longitude and Latitude. The limits of the habitable earth were Thule, or Iceland, to the north; Taprobane, or Ceylon, to the east; the Aromatic Cape, to the south, and the Sacred Promontory in Portugal to the west. North of Thule it was too cold, and south of the Cape of Spices it was too hot, to support life.

All that the ancient world knew of geography was gathered up by Ptolemy and systematized in a scheme which among learned men was the standard of belief for fourteen centuries afterward. This great Egyptian of the second century eliminated errors, corrected reckonings, and brought his science abreast of facts which traders had gathered. He made, however, three great errors, each, as it proved, more useful than the truth would have been. Ptolemy estimated the circumference of the earth as one-sixth less than the fact, although Eratosthenes had already reached the correct figure. Thus the true sailing distance from Spain west to Asia was reduced by about 4,000 miles and the later venture of Columbus made to seem a task less formidable. Ptolemy also gave Asia a vast extension eastward, further reducing the apparent distance of a westward route from Europe to the Orient.