tio, 1639, for similar view; and, for one narrative in which the
idea was developed into an amazing mass of pious myths, see Pilgrimage
of the Russian Abbot Daniel, edited by Sir C. W. Wilson, London, 1885,
p. 14. (The passage deserves to be quoted as an example of myth-making;
it is as follows: "At the time of our Lord's crucifixion, when he gave
up the ghost on the cross, the veil of the temple was rent, and the rock
above Adam's skull opened, and the blood and water which flowed from
Christ's side ran down through the fissure upon the skull, thus washing
away the sins of men.")

Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way from our sacred
writings into medieval map-making: two others were almost as marked.
First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and Magog. Few
passages in the Old Testament are more sublime than the denunciation
of these great enemies by Ezekiel; and the well-known statement in the
Apocalypse fastened the Hebrew feeling regarding them with a new meaning
into the mind of the early Church: hence it was that the medieval
map-makers took great pains to delineate these monsters and their
habitations on the maps. For centuries no map was considered orthodox
which did not show them.

The second conception was derived from the mention in our sacred books
of the "four winds." Hence came a vivid belief in their real existence,
and their delineation on the maps, generally as colossal heads with
distended cheeks, blowing vigorously toward Jerusalem.

After these conceptions had mainly disappeared we find here and there
evidences of the difficulty men found in giving up the scriptural idea
of direct personal interference by agents of Heaven in the ordinary
phenomena of Nature: thus, in a noted map of the sixteenth century
representing the earth as a sphere, there is at each pole a crank, with
an angel laboriously turning the earth by means of it; and, in another
map, the hand of the Almighty, thrust forth from the clouds, holds the
earth suspended by a rope and spins it with his thumb and fingers.
Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century Heylin, the most
authoritative English geographer of the time, shows a like tendency to
mix science and theology. He warps each to help the other, as follows:
"Water, making but one globe with the earth, is yet higher than it.
This appears, first, because it is a body not so heavy; secondly, it is
observed by sailors that their ships move f