An historical survey of the astronomy of the ancients / by Sir George Cornewall Lewis.
- George Cornewall Lewis
- Date:
- 1862
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An historical survey of the astronomy of the ancients / by Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
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![The original idea of the earth, as we find it in the Homeric poems, and as it still continued to be entertained, after a lapse of five centuries, in the time of Herodotus, was that it was a circular plane, surmounted (3) and bounded by the heaven, which was a solid vault, or hemisphere, with its concavity turned downwards. (4) That the earth was a plane, appeared to result from the evidence of the senses. The belief that this plane was circular, seems to have had its origin in two causes. First, the fact, that whether the spectator is on a high eminence, or in a large plain, or at sea, the horizon appears everywhere equidistant from the eye, naturally led, in the infancy of geographical knowledge, to a rude induction that the entire earth was circular. When geographers began to con- struct maps, by adding the form and size of one country to another, they arrived at a different conception of the figure of the earth. Hence Herodotus, who attempted to solve this pro- blem by personal observation and inquiry during his travels, and by subsequent reflection upon the information which he had thus obtained, ridicules the idea of the circularity of the earth, and treats it as childish. c Many even now (he savs) commit the ludicrous and ignorant error of drawing a map of the earth, in which it is represented of a circular form, as if its outline were traced with a compass, and the ocean is made to flow round it/(5) The ancients (says Agathemerus, in his (3) Tula dk toi Trpwrov fxiu tytivaro Jaov tavry Ovpavbv aaTtpotvB', iva fitv irtpi 7rdvra koKvtttoi. Hesiod, Theog. 126-7. (4) See Volcker's Homerische Geographie, pp. 97-101, and the autho- rities cited by him. Homer calls the heaven xa^K'i0Qi iroXixaXicoe, and <n8i]peoc, II. v. 504; xvii. 425 ; Od. iii. 2, xv. 328, xvii. 565, which epithets must express its solidity, though Volcker, p. 5, refers them to its im- perishableness. Even Empedocles considered the heaven as solid: 'EjU7T£<5oK\f/g (TTSpfflVlOV tlvdl TOV OvpCLVOV, Stob. Ed. PliyS. i. 23. (5) 7e^w Se opeiov yrjs nepiodovs ypd\j/avras noXXavs fj8r], xai ovdeva voov iXovTas f£r]yri(Tdp.evov' 01 axeavov re peovra ypd<povcrt TTf'pi£ ttjv yjjv iovaav kv- KXorepea cos dno ropvov, iv. 36. A ropvos was probably a string fastened to a pin or peg, with which either a circle or a straight line could be drawn on a flat surface. It is used in the latter sense by Theognis, v. S03. Eurip. Bacch. 1066, describes a tree bent down to the ground by force as follows: B 2](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21015855_0017.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
