In many details they corrected
and amplified the Greek results. But most of their geographical theories
were mere reproductions of Ptolemy's, and to his mistakes they added
wilder though less important confusions or inventions of their own. The
result of all this, by the tenth century A.D., was a geography, based
not on knowledge, but on ideas of symmetry. It was a scheme fit for the
_Arabian Nights_.
And how did Ptolemy lend himself to this?
His chief mistakes were only two;--but they were mistakes from which at
any rate Strabo and most of the Greek geographers are free. He made the
Indian Ocean an inland sea, and he filled up the Southern Hemisphere
with Africa, or the unknown Antarctic land in which he extended
Africa.[8] The Dark Continent, in his map, ran out on the one side to
the south-east of China, and on the other to the indefinite west, though
there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It was a
triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science under
Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known; it was not
yet settled or fully known; and so a great student constructed a
_melange_ of fact and fancy mainly based on a guess-work of imaginary
astronomical reckonings.
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