And mayhap they
are right."[318]

[Footnote 317: Such views have their advocates even now. There
still lives, I believe, in England, a certain John Hampden, who
with dauntless breast maintains that the earth is a circular
plane with centre at the north pole and a circumference of
nearly 30,000 miles where poor misguided astronomers suppose
the south pole to be. The sun moves across the sky at a
distance of about 800 miles. From the boundless abyss beyond
the southern circumference, with its barrier of icy mountains,
came the waters which drowned the antediluvian world; for, as
this author quite reasonably observes, "on a globular earth
such a deluge would have been physically Impossible." Hampden's
title is somewhat like that of Cosmas,--_The New Manual of
Biblical Cosmography_, London, 1877; and he began in 1876 to
publish a periodical called _The Truth-Seeker's Oracle and
Scriptural Science Review_. Similar views have been set forth
by one Samuel Rowbotham, under the pseudonym of "Parallax,"
_Zetetic Astronomy. Earth not a Globe. An experimental inquiry
into the true figure of the earth, proving it a plane without
orbital or axial motion_, etc., London, 1873; and by a William
Carpenter, _One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe_,
Baltimore, 1885. There is a very considerable quantity of such
literature afloat, the product of a kind of mental aberration
that thrives upon paradox. When I was superintendent of the
catalogue of Harvard University library, I made the class
"Eccentric Literature" under which to group such books,--the
lucubrations of circle-squarers, angle-trisectors, inventors of
perpetual motion, devisers of recipes for living forever
without dying, crazy interpreters of Daniel and the Apocalypse,
upsetters of the undulatory theory of light, the
Bacon-Shakespeare lunatics, etc.; a dismal procession of
long-eared bipeds, with very raucous bray. The late Professor
De Morgan devoted a bulky and instructive volume to an account
of such people and their crotchets. See his _Budget of
Paradoxes_, London, 1872.]

[Footnote 318: Cosmas, ii. 138. Further mention of China was
made early in