active for a
passive principle,--a principle of equalizing the temperature by acting
upon it, for a principle of inert impassibility to the temperature. And
of course not only would the sailor himself be in error in taking such a
view, but he might seriously compromise the intelligence or integrity of
his friend in the judgment of all who held, on his testimony, that it
was with his friend, and not from his own misconception of his friend's
meaning, that the view had originated. And how, let us ask, ere
dismissing our lengthened illustration, is an error such as the
supposed one here to be tested, and its erroneousness exposed? There can
be but one reply to such a query. It might be wholly in vain to fall
back upon the _ipsissima verba_ of the revelation made by the sailor's
friend. Though in reality but an enunciation regarding the _authorship_
of certain chronometers, it might possibly enough appear, from its
metonymic character, to be also a revelation regarding the
_construction_ of chronometers. The sailor's error respecting the
construction of chronometers is to be tested and exposed, not by any
references to what his friend had said, but by the art of the
chronometer maker. The demonstrable principles of the art, as practised
by the makers of chronometers, must be the test of all supposed
_revelations_ regarding the principles and mechanism of chronometer
making.

[Illustration: Fig. 114.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF COSMAS.[33]

(_From a reduced facsimile of the original print in the British
Museum._)]

Now, it will be found that those mistakes of the theologians to which I
refer have been exactly similar to that of the navigator in the supposed
case, and that they are mistakes which must be corrected on exactly the
same principle. The departments in which the mistakes have been made,
have, as in the false religious, been chiefly three,--the geographic,
astronomic, and geologic provinces. The geographic errors are of
comparatively ancient date. They belong mainly to the later patristic
and earlier middle ages, when the monk Cosmas, as the geographer of the
Church, represented the earth as a parallelogrammical plain, twice
longer than it was broad, deeply indented by the inland seas,--the
Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf,--and
encompassed by a rectangular trench occupied by the oceans. Some of my
audience will, however, remember that of the council of clergymen which
met in Salamanca in 1