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GEOGRAPHY.
I.THE FORM OF THE EARTH.
Among various rude tribes we find survivals of a primitive idea that the earth is a flat table or disk, ceiled, domed, or canopied by the sky, and that the sky rests upon the mountains as pillars.

Such a belief is entirely natural; it conforms to the appearance of things, and hence at a very early period entered into various theologies.
In the civilizations of Chaldea and Egypt it was very fully developed.
The Assyrian inscriptions deciphered in these latter years represent the god Marduk as in the beginning creating the heavens and the earth: the earth rests upon the waters; within it is the realm of the dead; above it is spread "the firmament"-- a solid dome coming down to the horizon on all sides and resting upon foundations laid in the "great waters" which extend around the earth.
On the east and west sides of this domed firmament are doors, through which the sun enters in the morning and departs at night; above it extends another ocean, which goes down to the ocean surrounding the earth at the horizon on all sides, and which is supported and kept away from the earth by the firmament.

Above the firmament and the upper ocean which it supports is the interior of heaven.
The Egyptians considered the earth as a table, flat and oblong, the sky being its ceiling--a huge "firmament" of metal.

At the four corners of the earth were the pillars supporting this firmament, and on this solid sky were the "waters above the heavens." They believed that, when chaos was taking form, one of the gods by main force raised the waters on high and spread them out over the firmament; that on the under side of this solid vault, or ceiling, or firmament, the stars were suspended to light the earth, and that the rains were caused by the letting down of the waters through its windows.