GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES We have seen how, by a slow process of conquest and expansion, the ancient world got to know a large part of the Eastern Hemisphere, and how this knowledge was summed up in the great work of Claudius Ptolemy.

We have now to learn how much of this knowledge was lost or 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 mediaeval 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.
[Footnote 1: It is fair to add that Professor Miller's researches have shown that some of the "unscientific" qualities of the mediaeval _mappoe mundi_ were due to Roman models.] 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.

S, "This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations...