avigated, and vessels have thus sailed along all the coasts
of the old world, I shall, before proceeding farther in my sketch of
the voyage of the _Vega_, give a short account of the development of
our knowledge of the north coast of Asia.

Already in primitive times the Greeks assumed that all the countries
of the earth were surrounded by the ocean. STRABO, in the first
century before Christ, after having shown that HOMER favoured this
view, brings together in the first chapter of the First Book of his
geography reasons in support of it in the following terms:--

"In all directions in which man has penetrated to the
uttermost boundary of the earth, he has met the sea, that
is, the ocean. He has sailed round the east coast towards
India, the west coast towards Iberia and Mauritia, and a
great part of the south and north coast. The remaining
portion which has not yet been sailed round in consequence
of the voyages which have been undertaken from both sides
not having been connected, is inconsiderable. For those who
have attempted to circumnavigate the earth and have turned,
declare that their undertaking did not fail in consequence
of their having met with land, but in consequence of want
of provisions and of complete timidity.

At sea they could always have gone further. This view (that
the earth is surrounded by water) also accords better with
the phenomena of the tides, for as the ebb and flow are
everywhere the same, or at least do not vary much, the
cause of this motion is to be sought for in a single
ocean."[289]

But if men were thus agreed that the north coast of Asia and Europe
was bounded by the sea, there was for sixteen hundred years after
the birth of Christ no actual knowledge of the nature of the Asiatic
portion of this line of coast. Obscure statements regarding it,
however, were current at an early period.

While HERODOTUS, in the forty-fifth chapter of his Fourth Book,
expressly says that no man, so far as was then known, had discovered
whether the eastern and northern countries of Europe are surrounded
by the sea, he gives in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth chapters
of the same book the following account of the countries lying to the
north-east:--

"As far as the territory of the Scythians all the land
which we have described is an uninterrupted plain, with
cultivable soil, but beyond that the ground is ston