perverted—how geography, for a time, lost the character of a science, and became once more the subject of mythical fancies similar to those which we. found in its earliest stages. Instead of knowledge which, if not quite exact, was at any rate approximately measured, the mediæval teachers who concerned themselves with the configuration of the inhabited world substituted their own ideas of what ought to be.[1] This is a process which applies not alone to geography, but to all branches of knowledge, which, after the fall of the Roman Empire, ceased to expand or progress, became mixed up with fanciful notions, and only recovered when a knowledge of ancient science and thought was restored in the fifteenth century. But in geography we can more easily see than in other sciences the exact nature of the disturbing influence which prevented the acquisition of new knowledge.
Briefly put, that disturbing influence was religion, or rather theology; not, of course, religion in the proper sense of the word, or theology based on critical principles, but theological conceptions deduced from a slavish adherence to texts of Scripture, very often seriously misunderstood. To quote a single example: when it is said in Ezekiel v. 5, "This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations ... round about her," this was not taken by the mediæval monks, who were the chief geographers of the period, as a poetical statement, but as an exact mathematical law, which determined the form
- ↑ It is fair to add that Professor Miller's researches have shown that some of the "unscientific" qualities of the mediæval mappæ mundi were due to Roman models.
