ience. His writings on history and
geography are preserved only in quotations by Cicero, Strabo,
and others.

Geographical knowledge however was most notably advanced by Strabo, who
lived in the Augustan era; although his researches were chiefly confined
to the Roman empire. Strabo was, like Herodotus, a great traveller, and
much of his geographical information is the result of his own
observations. It is probable he was much indebted to Eratosthenes, who
preceded him by three centuries. The authorities of Strabo were chiefly
Greek, but his work is defective from the imperfect notions which the
ancients had of astronomy; so that the determination of the earth's
figure by the measure of latitude and longitude, the essential
foundation of geographical description, was unknown. The enormous
strides which all forms of physical science have made since the
discovery of America throw all ancient descriptions and investigations
into the shade, and Strabo appears at as great disadvantage as Pliny or
Ptolemy; yet the work of Strabo, considering his means, and the
imperfect knowledge of the earth's surface and astronomical science in
his day, was really a great achievement. He treats of the form and
magnitude of the earth, and devotes eight books to Europe, six to Asia,
and one to Africa. The description of places belongs to Strabo, whose
work was accepted as the text-book of the science till the fifteenth
century, for in his day the Roman empire had been well surveyed. He
maintained that the earth is spherical, and established the terms
_longitude_ and _latitude_, which Eratosthenes had introduced, and
computed the earth to be one hundred and eighty thousand stadia in
circumference, and a degree to be five hundred stadia in length, or
sixty-two and a-half Roman miles. His estimates of the length of a
degree of latitude were nearly correct; but he made great errors in the
degrees of longitude, making the length of the world from east to west
too great, which led to the belief in the practicability of a western
passage to India. He also assigned too great length to the
Mediterranean, arising from the difficulty of finding the longitude with
accuracy. But it was impossible, with the scientific knowledge of his
day, to avoid errors, and we are surprised that he made so few.

Whatever may be said of the accuracy of the great geographer of
antiquity, it cannot be denied that he was a man of immense research and
learning. His work in