knowledge of the Earth’s surface, that one might have expected his book
to have had a sudden effect upon the Science of Geography: but no such
result occurred speedily, nor was its beneficial effect of any long
duration.
No doubt several causes contributed to the slowness of its action
upon the notions of Cosmographers, of which the unreal character
attributed to the Book, as a collection of romantic marvels rather than
of geographical and historical facts, may have been one, as Santarem
urges. But the essential causes were no doubt the imperfect nature
of publication before the invention of the press; the traditional
character which clogged geography as well as all other branches of
knowledge in the Middle Ages; and the entire absence of scientific
principle in what passed for geography, so that there was no organ
competent to the assimilation of a large mass of new knowledge.
Of the action of the first cause no examples can be more striking than
we find in the false conception of the Caspian as a gulf of the Ocean,
entertained by Strabo, and the opposite error in regard to the Indian
Sea held by Ptolemy, who regards it as an enclosed basin, when we
contrast these with the correct ideas on both subjects possessed by
Herodotus. The later Geographers no doubt knew his statements, but did
not appreciate them, probably from not possessing the evidence on which
they were based.
[Sidenote: General characteristics of Mediæval Cosmography.]