ABSTRACT
Among various rude tribes historians 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. Every great people of antiquity regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth naturally led to thought regarding its inhabitants—the idea of antipodes: of human beings on the earth's opposite sides. But another subject in geography had stirred the minds of thinking men—the earth's size. From the actions of the Church upon geography, it can be said that the dogmas developed in strict adherence to Scripture and the conceptions held in the Church during many centuries "always, everywhere, and by all", were, on the whole, steadily hostile to truth; but it is only just to make a distinction here between the religious and the theological spirit.
