teresting discoveries paled before the famous land
of Thule, six days' voyage north of Britain, in the neighbourhood of
the frozen ocean. Grand excitement reigned among geographers when they
heard of Thule, and a very sea of romance rose up around the name.
Had Pytheas indeed found the end of the world? Was it an island? Was
it mainland? In the childhood of the world, when so little was known
and so much imagined, men's minds caught at the name of Thule--Ultima
Thule--far-away Thule, and weaved round it many and beautiful legends.
But to-day we ask: Was it Iceland? Was it Lapland? Was it one of the
Shetland Isles?

[Illustration: NORTH BRITAIN AND THE ISLAND OF THULE. From Mercator's
edition of Ptolemy's map.]

"Pytheas said that the farthest parts of the world are those which
lie about Thule, the northernmost of the Britannic Isles, but he never
said whether Thule was an island or whether the world was habitable
by man as far as that point. I should think myself"--the speaker is
Strabo, a famous Greek traveller who wrote seventeen books of
geography--"I should think myself that the northern limit of habitude
lies much farther to the south, for the writers of our age say nothing
of any place beyond Ireland, which is situate in front of the northern
parts of Britain." Pytheas said that Thule was six days' sail north
of Britain. "But who in his senses would believe this?" cries Strabo
again. "For Pytheas, who described Thule, has been shown to be the
falsest of men. A traveller, starting from the middle of Britain and
going five hundred miles to the north, would come to a country somewhere
about Ireland, where living would be barely possible."

The first account of the Arctic regions likewise reads like pure
romance to the ignorant and untravelled. "After one day's journey to
the north of Thule," says Pytheas, "men come to a sluggish sea, where
there is no separation of sea, land, and air, but a mixture of these
elements like the substance of jelly-fish, through which one can
neither walk nor sail." Here the nights were very short, sometimes
only two hours, after which the sun rose again. This, in fact, was
the "Sleeping Palace of the Sun."

With all this wealth of discovery, Pytheas returned home by the Bay
of Biscay to the mouth of the Gironde; thence he sailed up the Garonne,
and from the modern town of Bordeaux he reached Marseilles by an
overland journey.

CHAPTER VII

JULIUS CAESAR AS EXPLORER

Our