old, so that if
you pour water on the ground you will not make mud, but if
you light a fire you will make mud. Even the sea freezes,
and the whole Cimmerian Bosphorus, and the Scythians who
live within the trench travel on the ice and drive over it
in waggons. . . . Again, with reference to the feathers
with which the Scythians say the air is filled, and which
prevent the whole land lying beyond from being seen or
travelled through, I entertain the following opinion. In
the upper parts of this country it snows continually, but,
as is natural, less in summer than in winter. And whoever
has seen snow falling thick near him will know what I mean.
For snow resembles feathers, and on account of the winter
being so severe the northern parts of this continent cannot
be inhabited. I believe then that the Scythians and their
neighbours called snow feathers, on account of the
resemblance between them. This is what is stated regarding
the most remote regions."

These and other similar statements, nowithstanding the absurdities
mixed up with them, are founded in the first instance on the
accounts of eye-witnesses, which have passed from mouth to mouth,
from tribe to tribe, before they were noted down. Still several
centuries after the time of Herodotus, when the Roman power had
reached its highest point, little more was known of the more remote
parts of north Asia. While Herodotus, in the two hundred and third
chapter of his First Book, says that "the Caspian is a sea by itself
having no communication with any other sea," Strabo, induced by
evidence furnished by the commander of a Greek fleet in that sea,
states (Book II. chapters i. and iv.) that the Caspian is a gulf of
the Northern Ocean, from which it is possible to sail to India PLINY
THE ELDER (_Historia Naturalis_, Book VI. chapters xiii. and xvii.)
states that the north part of Asia is occupied by extensive deserts
bounded on the north by the Scythian Sea, that these deserts run out
to a headland, _Promontorium Scythicum_, which is uninhabitable on
account of snow. Then there is a land inhabited by man-eating
Scythians, then deserts, then Scythians again, then deserts with
wild animals to a mountain ridge rising out of the sea, which is
called _Tabin_. The first people that are known beyond this are the
Seri. PTOLEMY and his successors again supposed, though perhaps not
ignorant of the old statement that