It is true that Strabo's China is cramped and cut short; that his Ceylon
(Taprobane) is even larger than Ptolemy's; that Ireland (Ierne) appears
to the _north_ of Britain; and that the Caspian joins the North Sea by a
long and narrow channel; but the true shape of India, of the Persian
Gulf and the Euxine, of the Sea of Azov and the Mediterranean, is marked
rightly enough in general outline. This earlier chart has not the
elaborate completeness of Ptolemy's, but it is free from his enormous
errors, and it has all the advantage of science, however imperfect, over
brilliant guessing.
Of course, even in Ptolemy, this guess-work pure and simple only comes
in at intervals and does not so much affect the central and, for his
day, far more important tracts of the Old World, but we have yet to see
how, in the mediaeval period and under Arabic imagination, all geography
seemed likely to become an exercise of fancy.
The chief Greek descriptions of the world, we must clearly remember,
were before the mediaeval workers, Christian and Moslem, from the first;
these men took their choice, and the point is that they, and specially
the Arabs, chose with rare exceptions the last of these, the Ptolemaic
system, because it was the more ambitious, symmetrical, and pretty.
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