s, of men, animals, birds, fishes, and plants,
of minerals and medicines and precious stones, of commerce and the fine
arts. He is full of errors, but his work is among the most valuable
productions of antiquity. Buffon pronounced his Natural History to
contain an infinity of knowledge in every department of human
occupation, conveyed in a dress ornate and brilliant. It is a literary
rather than a scientific monument, and as such it is wonderful. In
strict scientific value, it is inferior to the works of modern research;
but there are few minds, even in these times, who have directed
inquiries to such a variety of subjects as are treated in Pliny's
masterpiece.

If we would compare the geographical knowledge of the ancients with that
of the moderns, we confess to the immeasurable inferiority of
the ancients.

Eratosthenes, though more properly an astronomer, and the most
distinguished among the ancients, was also a considerable writer on
geography, indeed, the first who treated the subject systematically,
although none of his writings have reached us. The improvements he
pointed out were applied by Ptolemy himself. His work was a presentation
of the geographical knowledge known in his day, so far as geography is
the science of determining the position of places on the earth's
surface. When Eratosthenes began his labors, in the third century before
Christ, it was known that the surface of the earth was spherical; he
established parallels of latitude and longitude, and attempted the
difficult undertaking of measuring the circumference of the globe by the
actual measurement of a segment of one of its great circles.

Hipparchus (beginning of second century before Christ) introduced into
geography a great improvement; namely, the relative situation of
places, by the same process that he determined the positions of the
heavenly bodies. He also pointed out how longitude might be determined
by observing the eclipses of the sun and moon. This led to the
construction of maps; but none have reached us except those that were
used to illustrate the geography of Ptolemy. Hipparchus was the first
who raised geography to the rank of a science. He starved himself to
death, being tired of life.

Posidonius, who was nearly a century later, determined the arc of a
meridian between Rhodes and Alexandria to be a forty-eighth part of the
whole circumference,--an enormous calculation, yet a remarkable one in
the infancy of astronomical sc