n legends old!
Alas! to our posterity Will no such tales be told. We know too
much: scroll after scroll Weighs down our weary shelves: Our only
point of ignorance Is centred in ourselves."

There was a belief among the Persians that Kaf, a mountain two
thousand miles high, formed a rim to the flat world and prevented
travellers from ever falling off.6 The fact that the earth is a
globe inhabited on all sides is a comparatively recent piece of
knowledge. So late as in the eighth century Pope Zachary accused
Virgilius, an Irish mathematician and monk, of heresy for
believing in the existence of antipodes.7 St. Boniface wrote to
the Pope against Virgilius; and Zachary ordered a council to be
held to expel him from the Church, for "professing, against God
and his own soul, so perverse and wicked a doctrine." To the
ancients all beyond the region they had traversed was an unknown
land, clothed in darkness, crowded with mystery and allurement.
Across the weltering wastes of brine, in a halcyon sea, the Hindu
placed the White Isle, the dwelling of translated and immortalized
men.8 Under the attraction of a mystic curiosity, well might the
old, wearied Ulysses say,

"Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push
off, and, sitting well in order, smite The sounding furrows; for
my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all
the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash
us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the
great Achilles, whom we knew."

Decius Brutus and his army, as Florus relates, reaching the coast
of Portugal, where, for the first time, they saw the sun setting
in the blood tinged ocean, turned back their standards with horror
as they beheld "the huge corpse of ruddy gold let down into the
deep." The Phoenician traders brought intelligence to Greece of a
people, the Cimmerians, who dwelt on the borders of Hades in the
umbered realms of perpetual night. To the dying Roman, on the
farthest verge of the known horizon hovered a vision of Elysian
Fields. And the American

6 Adventures of Hatim Tai, p. 36, note.

7 Whewell, Hist. Inductive Sciences, vol. i. book iv. ch. i. sect.
7.

8 Wilford, Essays on the Sacred Isles, In Asiatic Researches,
vols. viii. xi.

Indian, sinking in battle or the chase, caught glimpses of happier
Hunting Grounds, whose woods trooped with game, and where the
arrows of the braves never missed, and there was n