a westerly, aspect. The extent
of this side is about five hundred miles. The second trends off towards
Spain. Off the coast here is Ireland, which is considered only half
as large as Britain. Halfway across is an island called 'Man,' and
several smaller islands also are believed to be situated opposite this
coast, in which there is continuous night for thirty days. The length
of this side is eight hundred miles. Thus the whole island is two
thousand miles in circumference. The people of the interior do not,
for the most part, cultivate grain, but live on milk and flesh-meat,
and clothe themselves with skins. All Britons, without exception,
stain themselves with woad, which produces a bluish tint. They wear
their hair long."

Caesar crossed the Thames. "The river can only be forded at one spot,"
he tells us, "and there with difficulty." Farther he did not go. And
so this is all that was known of Britain for many a long year to come.

CHAPTER VIII

STRABO'S GEOGRAPHY

Strabo wrote his famous geography near the beginning of the Christian
era, but he knew nothing of the north of England, Scotland, or Wales.
He insisted on placing Ireland to the north, and scoffed at Pytheas'
account of Thule.

And yet he boasted a wider range than any other writer on geography,
"for that those who had penetrated farther towards the West had not
gone so far to the East, and those on the contrary who had seen more
of the East had seen less of the West."

Like Herodotus, Strabo had travelled himself from Armenia and western
Italy, from the Black Sea to Egypt and up the Nile to Philae. But his
seventeen volumes--vastly important to his contemporaries--read like
a romance to us to-day, and a glance at the map laid down according
to his descriptions is like a vague and distorted caricature of the
real thing. And yet, according to the men of his times, he "surpasses
all the geographical writings of antiquity, both in grandeur of plan
and in abundance and variety of its materials."

Strabo has summed up for us the knowledge of the ancient world as it
was in the days of the Emperor Caesar Augustus of the great Roman Empire,
as it was when in far-off Syria the Christ was born and the greater
part of the known earth was under the sway of Rome.

A wall-map had already been designed by order of Augustus to hang in
a public place in Rome--the heart of the Empire--so that the young
Romans might realise the size of their inheritance, whil