blems of ancient geography were explained: where
Ptolemy's knowledge failed him altogether, no Western of that time had
ever been, or was likely to go. The whole realised and unrealised world
was described with such clearness and consistency, men thought, that
what was lacking in Aristotle was now supplied.

Yet it is worth while observing how, centuries before Ptolemy, in the
ages nearer to Aristotle himself, the geography of Eratosthenes and
Strabo, by a more balanced use of knowledge and by a greater restraint
of fancy, had composed a far more reliable chart.[9]

[Footnote 9: In using the expressions "Chart," or "Map" of Strabo's
description (_c._ A.D. 20), it is not meant to imply that Strabo himself
left more than a written description from which a plan was afterwards
prepared: "The world according to Strabo." The same applies to
Eratosthenes (_c._ B.C. 200) and all pre-Ptolemaic Greek geographers.
Ptolemy's Atlas, probably, and the Peutinger Table, more certainly, are
maps really drawn by ancient designers; but these are the only ones that
have survived from a much larger number.]

This earlier and discredited map avoided all the more serious
perversions of Ptolemy. Africa was cut off at the limit of actual
knowledge, about Cape Non on the west and Cape Guardafui on the east;
and the "Cinnamon-bearing Coast," between these points, was fringed by
the Mountains of AEthiopia, where the Nile rose. This was the theory
which revived on the decline of the Ptolemaic, and which encouraged the
Portuguese sailors with hopes of a quick approach to India round Africa,
as the great eastern bend of the Guinea coast seemed to suggest.
Further, on this pre-Ptolemaic map the Southern Ocean was left untouched
by a supposed Southern Continent, and except for an undue shrinkage of
the Old World in general as an island in the midst of the vast
surrounding ocean, a reliable description of Western Asia and Central
Europe and North Africa was in the hands of the learned world two
hundred years before Christ.

It is true that Strabo's China is cramped and cut short; that his Ceylon
(Taprobane) is even larger than Ptolemy's; that Ireland (Ierne) appears
to the _north_ of Britain; and that the Caspian joins the North Sea by a
long and narrow channel; but the true shape of India, of the Persian
Gulf and the Euxine, of the Sea of Azov and the Mediterranean, is marked
rightly enough in general outline. This earlier chart has not the
elabora