free. He made the
Indian Ocean an inland sea, and he filled up the Southern Hemisphere
with Africa, or the unknown Antarctic land in which he extended
Africa.[8] The Dark Continent, in his map, ran out on the one side to
the south-east of China, and on the other to the indefinite west, though
there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It was a
triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science under
Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known; it was not
yet settled or fully known; and so a great student constructed a
_melange_ of fact and fancy mainly based on a guess-work of imaginary
astronomical reckonings. On the far east, Ptolemy joined China and
Africa; and on this imaginary western coast, fronting Malacca and
Further India, he placed various gratuitous towns and rivers. Coming to
smaller matters, he cut away the whole of the Indian peninsula proper,
though preserving the Further or "Golden" Chersonesus of the Malays, and
he enlarged Taprobane, or Ceylon, to double the size of Asia Minor. Thus
the southern coast of Asia from Arabia to the Ganges ran almost due
east, with a strait of sea coming through the modern Carnatic, between
the continent and the Great Spice Island, which included most of the
Deccan. The Persian Gulf, much greater on this map than the Black Sea,
was made equal in length and breadth; the shape of the Caspian was, so
to say, turned inside out and its length given as from east to west,
instead of from north to south; while the coast line, even of the
familiar Euxine, AEgean, and Southern Mediterranean, was anything but
true. Scandinavia was an island smaller than Ireland; Scotland
represented a great eastern bend of Britain, with the Shetlands and
Faeroes (Thule) lying a short distance to the north, but on the left-hand
side of the great island. The Sea of Azov, hardly inferior to the
Euxine, stretched north half way across Russia. All Central Africa and
the great Southern or Antarctic continent was described as pathless
desert--"a land uninhabitable from the heat"; and the sources of the
Nile were accounted for by the marshes and Mountains of the Moon.

[Footnote 8: Rejecting the old idea of an encircling ocean as the girdle
or limit of the known world, and replacing it with a new fancy of
unbounded continent (on all sides except the north-west)--a fancy which
the vast extension of Roman Dominion under the Empire may have
fostered.]

Thus all the pro