Enveloping old stories of legendary lands and peoples as with an outer husk are beliefs which relate to the world as a whole. These concern the shape of the earth, the texture of the heavens, the distribution of land and water, the contours of continents, and the precise number of islands, countries, and cities. What they disclose is the instinct of men working through the apparent confusion of nature toward order. In all of them is the sense of symmetry, of balance, and because they are excursions into the unknown, the method of allegory. The true symmetry of the universe—the great annual journey of the earth around a sun itself in motion in a firmament so vast that through the ages the stars seem not to have changed their places—was not grasped. The result was errors, picturesque sometimes, sometimes more useful than truth.

Wherever one stands, the meeting line of the sky and earth forms a circle of which one is the center. This picture shaped the primitive geography. The earth was a disk and each people seemed to itself to be at the central point. In Homer it was a disk surrounded by a river called the Ocean Stream. The farther shore of this river supported the brazen dome of heaven, and earth and heaven were kept apart by the pillars which Atlas bore on his shoulders. Thales taught that the earth was a sort of drum floating upright in the wilderness of waters. The ancient Hebrews thought that the earth was a rising plain which floated like a lotus flower in the waters. The Tibetans believed the earth to be cone-shaped. The Chinese thought that all other lands were grouped as islands about their own. The Celts thought the earth rested on columns and in the Irish sea-tales various islands are pictured as standing on pillars. In North America the plains tribes thought that the Rocky Mountains supported the sky, the Pacific coast tribes conceived of the earth as an island swimming in the cosmic waters, and 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 geography 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 Phœnicians 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.

His third error was to assume that another continental mass joined the southern extension of Africa with a southeastern extension of Asia, completely landlocking the Indian Ocean. This was the Terra Australis Incognita of the older charts. It seemed to be needed to balance the land masses of the northern hemisphere and satisfy the persistent demand of the mind for symmetry in the arrangement of the earth. This vast domain has disappeared from the maps, but its name and part of its area are preserved in the island continent of Australia. Thus Ptolemy anticipated the discoveries of the Portuguese, Dutch, and English.

Much of what Ptolemy knew succeeding ages forgot. The mediæval conception of the world was that of a T within an O with the east at the top of the circle because Paradise was there and deserved the highest place, and Jerusalem as its center. The lower half of the circle was divided by the Mediterranean equally between Europe and Africa, while the upper half was all assigned to Asia. The Ægean and Red seas, branching to the left and the right from the head of the Mediterranean, divided the upper and lower halves of the circle, and these three seas formed the T within the O. Around all flowed the Ocean Stream.

Intellectually, this presentation of the habitable earth belongs in about the ninth century B. C. rather than the fifteenth century A. D., but the map, like the Ptolemaic geography, was a brief for discovery. It cut off the south of Africa, and made it seem a short voyage around it to India, and thereby it encouraged efforts to open a sea route to the Orient. It immensely extended Asia to the east, and thereby led Columbus to believe it might more easily be reached by sailing west. Also, it revived the reign of fable and made a new world of wonder. There were blank spaces on the map of Asia. The monkish map-makers filled them in with pictures of monstrous races and animals drawn from the classics, from Old Testament imagery, and from the Arab repertory.

It seemed at last that all the mistakes of geography were in conspiracy to unlock the unknown half of the world. The apocryphal book of Esdras had said that the earth was one part water and six parts dry land. That three-fourths of its surface was sea, nobody surmised. Marco Polo had moved Zipangu (Japan) a thousand miles east from its real position by giving its distance from the mainland of Asia as 1,500 miles instead of 1,500 li—a Chinese measure of about one-third of a mile. In the map of Toscanelli, on which Columbus counted much, the Asiatic coast was placed where California is. The Azores were supposed to lie far west of their true position. Columbus did not dream that 210 degrees of longitude lay between Lisbon and Japan by the westward route. He believed that by sailing from the Azores for about 3,100 miles he would find Zipangu, and not unknown Florida. “El mundo es poco” (“the world is small”), he exclaimed, and steered confidently toward the setting sun.

These great errors made the adventures of the Genoese in the New World a gorgeous illusion—the vestibule into a past where, as he thought, other feet had trodden, instead of the threshold of continents his feet were first to press. To him it seemed only that he was reading the book of Marco Polo backward. The gold and aromatics of which he found traces were those of the Golden Chersonese and the Spice Islands of the East. An Indian tale of a white-robed cacique aroused his hope of an interview with Prester John. He dispatched a mission, including a converted Jew who knew Hebrew, Chaldaic, and a little Arabic, to a chieftain of Cuba, in the hope that thus he might establish relations with the princely house of Kublai Khan. Presently he would sail farther and, leaving the tropical islands behind him, would round the Malay Peninsula, cross the Bay of Bengal and the Sea of the Arabs, and make his way by land from Ethiopia to Jerusalem, and by ship from Joppa back to Spain. It was a soaring dream, yet its wings beat feebly beneath the pinions of the tremendous reality the man died without comprehending.

Columbus added another chapter to one of the oldest beliefs—the theory of a world summit. Aristotle had thought that the highest part of the earth was under the antarctic pole, others that it was under the arctic pole. Columbus held that it was under the equator. The earth, he thought, had the shape of a pear instead of an orange. It seemed to him he knew just when the globe began to swell toward heaven. This was about a hundred leagues west of the Azores. There the magnetic needle swung from northeast to northwest. The airs became more pure and genial, the sea grew tranquil. From the climate of oppressive heat and unwholesome air, the explorer ascended the back of the sea, as one ascends a mountain toward heaven. The culminating point was on the Tierra Firma of South America, which might be approached by way of the Gulf of Paria. Thence flowed the mighty stream of the Orinoco.

A Spanish historian, excusing this fancy of Columbus, remarks that mathematicians have since demonstrated that he was not entirely wrong. The diameter of the earth is twenty-seven miles greater at the equator than at the poles, and the mountain country of Ecuador, beyond the headwaters of Orinoco, is the true world summit, for, of all lands, it lies nearest heaven.