cannot but think it exceedingly ridiculous to hear some
men talk of the circumference of the Earth, pretending without the
smallest reason or probability that the ocean encompasses the Earth,
that the Earth is round as if mechanically formed so, and that Asia is
equal to Europe.'

Herodotus found no difficulty in describing the figure and size of the
portions of the earth whose existence he recognised, but then he said,
'from India eastward the whole Earth is one vast desert, unknown and
unexplored.' And for long after Herodotus, the Mediterranean was
regarded as the central sea of the world, and in the time of Herodotus,
Rhodes was accounted the centre of that centre.

It is very interesting, however, to trace how many centres the world has
had in its time--or rather within the range of written history. The old
Egyptians placed it at Thebes, the Assyrians at Babylon, the Hindus at
Mount Meru, the Jews at Jerusalem, and the Greeks at Olympus, until they
moved it to Rhodes. There exists an old map in which the world is
represented as a human figure, and the heart of that figure is Egypt.
And there exists, or did exist, an old fountain in Sicily on which was
this inscription: 'I am in the centre of the garden; this garden is the
centre of Sicily, and Sicily is the Centre of the whole Earth.'

It is a grand thing to be positive in assertion when you are sure of
your ground, and the builder of this fountain seems to have been sure of
his. But then other people can be positive too, and in that vast desert
eastward of India, imagined by Herodotus, there is the country of China,
which calls itself the Middle Kingdom, and the Emperor of which, in a
letter to the King of England in this very nineteenth century, announced
that China is endowed by Heaven as the 'flourishing and central Empire'
of the world.

And yet, once upon a time, according to some old Japanese writings,
Japan was known as the Middle Kingdom; and the Persians claimed the same
position for Persia; and according to Professor Sayce, the old Chaldeans
said that the centre of the earth was in the heart of the impenetrable
forest of Eridu.

This forest, by the way, was also called the 'holy house of the Gods,'
but it does not seem to have had anything to do with the Terrestrial
Paradise, the exact location of which Mr. Baring-Gould has laboriously
tried to identify through the legends of the nations. It is a curious
fact that a ninth-century map, in the Strasb