It may be well to examine Herodotus’s geographical knowledge in some detail, as representing the general knowledge possessed by a student (increased by his own travels) as distinct from that possessed by traders and colonists in different particular directions. His knowledge of Europe proper was contained within rather narrow limits. He knew, from personal knowledge, or from information obtained from merchants and colonists familiar with the shores of the Euxine (Black Sea), of the country lying to the north of that sea for some distance, of the rivers which flowed into it from the north and from the west, and of various peoples either settled in or wandering over the land that is now mainly included in Russia. His notions of the comparative dimensions of the Euxine and of the Mæotis Palus (Sea of Azov) are altogether erroneous, as might have been expected; but he knew (though in the main vaguely) of the Tanais (Don), the Borysthenes (Dnieper), and other rivers which flow into those seas. The Ister (Danube) he knew as a river of considerable importance, but he made it rise in Spain and flow north-east and east through the greater part of Europe. He conceived it as corresponding to some extent in the direction of its course with that of the Nile on the other side of the Mediterranean. He had some vague notion of the Iberians and of the Celts, as inhabiting the country to the north of the Pillars of Hercules. He knew something of the country lying to the north of Greece, Illyria, Thessaly, and Thrace, and the Rhodope mountains. He has much to tell of the Scythians inhabiting the country north of the Black Sea, but it is difficult to make out exactly to what race they belonged and whither they had wandered; they may have been the forerunners of the Slav peoples. Of Europe to the north of the Danube, and of the Scythian country, he had no information of any importance. He did not believe in the Hyperboreans, nor did he credit the statement that there was any sea north of Europe. He has a good deal to say about Africa. He had been up the Nile as far as the first cataract to the old city of Elephantine, but above that his information is vague and largely erroneous. He knew of the great bend which the Nile takes to the west above Elephantine, and had heard of Meroe on the other side of that bend; but his notion of the length of Africa was so erroneous that, instead of carrying the Nile south into the interior of the continent, he made it rise far to the west and run eastwards before it turned north at Meroe. But he at least controverted the view that it rose in the ocean itself to the south--a belief based possibly on some rumour, transmitted through many lips, of the existence of great lakes towards its headwaters. As for a river flowing west-and-east, in the west of the continent, he had heard of such a river in a story of five Nasamonian youths who travelled south from the shore of the Syrtis,