fins too (but he has got (as usual) addled in his geography, and
puts them in ultima Thule or Shetland), and tells us, over and above the
reindeer-skin dresses, that the women never nursed their children, but
went out hunting with their husbands, hanging the papoose up to a tree,
as the Lapps do now, with a piece of deer's marrow in its mouth to keep
it employed; and moreover, that they sacrificed their captives to a war-
god (Mars he calls him) in cruel ugly ways. All which we may fully
believe.

Then Paul has to tell us how in the Scritfin country there is little or
no night in midsummer, little or no day in winter; and how the shadows
there are exceeding long, and shorten to nothing as they reach the
equator,--where he puts not merely Egypt, but Jerusalem. And how on
Christmas days a man's shadow is nine feet long in Italy, whereas at
Totonis Villam (Thionville), as he himself has measured, it is nineteen
feet and a half. Because, he says, shrewdly enough, the further you go
from the sun, the nearer the sun seems to the horizon. Of all which if
you answer--But this is not history: I shall reply--But it is better than
history. It is the history of history. It helps you to see how the
world got gradually known; how history got gradually to be written; how
each man, in each age, added his little grain to the great heap of facts,
and gave his rough explanation thereof; and how each man's outlook upon
this wondrous world grew wider, clearer, juster, as the years rolled on.

And therefore I have no objection at all to listen to Paul in his next
chapter, concerning the two navels of the ocean, one on each side
Britain--abysses which swallow up the water twice a day, and twice a day
spout it up again. Paul has seen, so he seems to say, the tide, the
[Greek text], that inexplicable wonder of the old Greeks and Romans,
running up far inland at the mouths of the Seine and Loire; and he has to
get it explained somehow, before he can go forward with a clear
conscience. One of the navels seems to be the Mahlstrom in Norway. Of
the place of the other there is no doubt. It is close to Evodia insula,
seemingly Alderney. For a high noble of the French told him so; he was
sucked into it, ships and all, and only escaped by clinging to a rock.
And after awhile the margins of that abyss were all left bare, leaving
the Frenchman high and dry, 'palpitating so with fear,' says Paul, 'that
he could hardly keep his seat.' But when