COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

516 COSMOS.
At Phasis, the navigators of the Euxine again found themselves
on a coast beyond which a Sun Lake was supposed to
be situated, and south of Gadeira and Tartessus their
eyes,
for
the first time, ranged over a boundless waste of waters. It
was this circumstance which, for fifteen hundred years, gave to
the gate of the inner sea a peculiar character of importance.
Ever striving to pass onwards, Phrenicians, Greeks, Arabs,
Catalans, Majorcaiis, Frenchmen from Dieppe and La Rochelle,
Genoese, Venetians, Portuguese, and Spaniards in turn
attempted to advance across the Atlantic Ocean, long held
to be a miry, shallow, dark, and misty sea, Mare tenebrosum ;
until proceeding from station to station, as it were, these
southern nations, after gaining the Canaries and the Azores,
finally came to the New Continent, which, however, had
already been reached by the Northmen at an earlier period and
from a different direction.
Whilst Alexander was opening the far east, the great Sta-
girite* was led, by a consideration of the form of the earth, to
conceive the idea of the proximity of India to the Pillars of
Hercules; whilst Strabo had even conjectured that there
might be " many other habitable tracts of land] in the northern
hemisphere, perhaps in the parallel which passes through
those Pillars, the island of Rhodes and Thina3, between the
coasts of Western Europe and Eastern Asia." The hypothesis
of the locality of such lands, in the prolongation of the
major axis of the Mediterranean, was connected with a grand
geographical view of Eratosthenes, current in antiquity,
and in accordance with which the whole of the Old Con-
tinent, in its widest extension from west to east, and nearly in
the 36 of latitude, was supposed to present an almost continuous
line of elevation.
oglia and ogli (see my Examen critique de I'hist, de la Geogr. t. i. pp.
33 and 182).
*
Aristot., de Ccdo, ii. 14 (p. 298, b. Bekk.); Meteor., ii. 5 (p. 362,
Bekk.) Compare my Examen critique, t. i. pp. 125-130. Seneca ventures
to say (Nat. Qucest. in preefat. 11), "Contemnet curiosus spectator
domicilii (terree) angustias. Quantum enim est quod ab ultimis iittori-
bus Hispaniae usque ad Indos jacet]
Paucissimorum dierum spatium.
BI navem suus ventus implevit." (Examen critique, t. i. p. 158.)
t Strabo, lib. i. pp. 65 and 118, Casaub. (Examen critique, t. i. 152.)
p.
J In the Diaphragma of Dicaearchus, Uy which the earth is divided,