the gods shudder; in a whole year it would be impossible to search through it.[3]

So early do we find three conceptions which two thousand years later still formed the foundation of the doctrine of the earth’s outer limits, especially on the north: (1) the all-embracing Oceanus or empty ocean; (2) the coincidence of sky, sea, land and underworld at the uttermost edge; and lastly (3) the dismal gulf into which even the gods were afraid of falling.

These or similar ideas still obtained long after the mathematical geographers had conceived the earth as a sphere. Pythagoras (568-about 494 B.C.) was probably the first to proclaim the doctrine of the spherical form of the earth. He relied less upon observation than upon the speculative idea that the sphere was the most perfect form. Before him Anaximander of Miletus (611-after 547 B.C.), to whom are attributed the invention of the gnomon or sun-dial, and the first representation of the earth’s disc on a map, had maintained that the earth was a cylinder floating in space; the inhabited part was the upper flat end. His pupil Anaximenes (second half of the sixth century B.C.) thought that the earth had the form of a trapezium, supported by the air beneath, which it compressed like the lid of a vase; while before him Thales of Miletus (640-about 548 B.C.) was inclined to hold that the earth’s disc swam on the surface of the ocean, in the middle of the hollow sphere of heaven, and that earthquakes were caused by movements of the waters.[4]

Parmenides of Elea (about 460 B.C.) divided the earth’s sphere into five zones or belts, of which three were uninhabitable: the zone of heat, or the scorched belt round the equator, and the two zones of cold at the poles. Between the warmth and the cold there were on either side of the hot zone two temperate zones where men might live. This division was originally derived from the five zones of the heavens, where the Arctic Circle formed the boundary of the northern stars that are always visible, and the tropics that of the zone dominated by the sun. Pythagoras seems to have been the first to transfer it to the globe, the centre of the universe.[5] This idea of the earth’s five habitable and uninhabitable zones was current till nearly the end of the Middle Ages; but at the same time one finds, often far on in the Middle Ages, the former conceptions of the empty ocean encircling all, and of the “œcumene” swimming in it as an island. Occasionally we meet with a vast unknown continent beyond this ocean, belonging to another world, which no one can reach.[6] Together with these theories, though not very conspicuously, the belief in the immeasurable gulf at the edge of the world also persisted; and this became the “Ginnungagap” of our forefathers.

The conception of the earth’s form and of its uttermost limits was thus by no means consistent, and on some points it was contradictory. We must always, and especially in dealing with past times, distinguish between the views of the scientific world and those of ordinary people, two aspects which were often hopelessly mixed together. And again in the scientific world we must distinguish between the mathematical-physical geographers and the historical, since the latter dealt more with descriptions and were apt to follow accounts and legends rather than what was taught by physical observations.

The world which the Greeks really knew was bounded in the earlier period on the north by the Balkans. These again gave rise to the mythical Rhipæan Mountains, which were soon moved farther to the north or north-east[7] as knowledge increased, and so they and the Alps were made the northern boundary of the known world. As to what lay farther off, the Greeks had very vague ideas; they seem to have thought that the frozen polar countries began there, where it was so cold that people had to wear breeches like the Scythians; or else it was a good climate, since it lay north of the north wind which came from the Rhipæan Mountains. But that some genuine information about the North had reached them as early as the time of the Odyssey seems to be shown by the tale of the Læstrygons—who had the long day, and whose shepherds, driving their flocks in at evening, could call to those who were setting out in the morning, since the paths of day and night were with them so close to one another—and of the Cimmerians at the gates of the underworld, who lived in a land of fog, on the shores of Oceanus, in eternal cheerless night. It is true that the poet seems to have imagined these countries somewhere in the east or north-east, probably by the Black Sea; for Odysseus came from the Læstrygons to the isle of Ææa “by the mansions and dancing-places of the Dawn and by the place where the sun rises.” And from Ææa the Greek hero steered right out into the night and the mist on the dangerous waters of Oceanus and came to the Cimmerians,[8] who must therefore have dwelt beyond the sunrise, shrouded in cloud and fogs. It might be supposed that it was natural to the poet to believe that there must be night beyond the sunrise and on the way to the descent to the nether regions; but it is, perhaps, more probable that both the long day and the darkness and fog are an echo of tales about the northern summer and the long winter night, and that these tales reached the Greeks by the trade-routes along the Russian rivers and across the Black Sea, for which reason the districts where these marvels were to be found were reported to lie in that direction. A find in the passage-graves of Mycenæ (fourteenth to twelfth century B.C.) of beads made of amber from the Baltic,[9] besides many pieces of amber from the period of the Dorian migration (before the tenth century) found during the recent English excavations of the temple of Artemis at Sparta,[10] furnish certain evidence that the Greek world had intercourse with the Baltic countries long before the Odyssey was put into writing in the eighth century, even though the northern lands of this poem seem to have been limited by a communication by sea between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, running north of the Balkan peninsula. Perhaps this imaginary communication may have been conceived as going by the Ister (Danube), which, at any rate later, was thought to