embraces. Yet, notwithstanding this powerful attraction, geography made
comparatively little progress: the love of luxury did not benefit it nearly
so much as the love of science. The geography of Ptolemy, and the
description of Greece by Pausanias, are, as Malte Brun justly remarks, the
last works in which the light of antiquity shines on geography. We may
further observe, that as circumstances directed the route to the east,
during the middle ages, principally through the central parts of Asia, the
countries thus explored, or visited, were among the least interesting in
this quarter of the globe, and those of which we possess, even at the
present day, very obscure and imperfect information.

The nations to whom geography and commerce were most indebted, during the
period which this chapter embraces, were the Arabians,--the Scandinavians,
--under that appellation comprehending the nations on the Baltic and in the
north of Germany,--and the Italian states. Before, however, we proceed to
notice and record their contributions to geography, discovery, and
commerce, it will be proper briefly to attend to a few circumstances
connected with those subjects, which occurred between the age of Ptolemy
and the utter decline of the Roman empire.

We have already alluded to the intercourse which was begun between Rome and
China, during the reign of Marcus Antoninus, for the purpose of obtaining
silk. Of the embassy which preceded and occasioned this commercial
intercourse, we derive all our information from the Chinese historians. A
second embassy seems to have been sent in the year A.D. 284, during the
reign of Probus: that the object of this also was commercial there can be
no doubt; but the particulars or the precise object in view, and the result
which flowed from it, are not noticed by the Chinese historians. There can
be no doubt, however, that these embassies contributed to extend the
geography and commerce of the Romans towards the eastern districts of Asia.

Of the attention which some of the Roman emperors, during the decline of
the empire, paid to commerce, we possess a few notices which deserve to be
recorded. The emperor Pertinax, whose father was a manufacturer and seller
of charcoal, and who, himself, for some time pursued the same occupation,
at that period an extensive and profitable one, preserved and exercised,
during his reign, that sense of the value of commerce which he had thus
acquired. He abolished all the