Berlin Academy[5], he conceives the Ister and the Nile to flow parallel but in opposite directions, and according to him, the Ister flows from north to south into the Euxine, just as the Nile flows from the south into the Mediterranean; in like manner the Indus and Araxes, according to him, flow from west to east, and the latter river, as conceived by him, is almost entirely fictitious. Geography, therefore, at that time was not universally known; its changeableness and accidental character is no where more obvious than in Herodotus himself. His notion of the course of the Nile is, that above the first cataract it flows from west to east, and that near Elephantine it turns round; and yet he might without difficulty have informed himself of the true state of the case. From an inscription found near the cataract among the ruins of the temple at Ipsambul, and which belongs to some Ionians and Carians, who had gone into those parts either as soldiers or as ostrich-hunters[6], it is clear that those Greeks went far beyond the cataracts, and were very well aware that the Nile flowed from the south. Another proof is furnished by the Attic orators: when Alexander had crossed the frontier mountains of India, Aeschines[7] conceived that he had advanced as far as the polar circle. Such expressions about the polar circles do not occur in Herodotus, for he does not know that the earth is a globe; this notion was probably first formed in the East, whence Eudoxus, the astronomer, received it in forming his sphaera, even before the time of Aristotle; and many of the expressions referring to it may have found their way into the language of ordinary life. At Athens all this was very confused, and many men, according to their own experience, formed individually very different notions of the geography of the earth. But as Scylax was accurate in regard to the East, so others were well informed about other parts; and at Massilia, _e.g._, much was known about the north from the voyages of Pytheas and others. For a long time people did not know what conception to form of the sea beyond Massilia; at Athens many, in the time of Plato, still believed that the ocean commenced on the west of Italy: but Polybius is already well acquainted with the road from Narbonne to the Ligeris, and thence to Britain. We must, therefore, not believe that this country was unknown to the Romans until the conquests of Caesar, and that it had no place in the maps of Eratosthenes.