The geographical doctrines which antiquity bequeathed to the Middle Ages were briefly these: that the earth was a sphere with a circumference of 252,000 or 180,000 stadia; that only the temperate zones were inhabitable, and the northern alone known to be inhabited; that of the southern, owing to the impassable heats of the torrid zone, it could not be discovered whether it were inhabited, or whether, indeed, land existed there; and that of the northern, it was unknown whether the intervention of another continent, or only the shoals and unknown horrors of the ocean, prevented a westward passage from Europe to Asia. The legatee preserved, but did not improve his inheritance. It has been supposed that the early Middle Ages, under the influence of barbarism and Christianity, ignored the sphericity of the earth, deliberately returning to the assumption of a plane surface, either wheel-shaped or rectangular. That knowledge dwindled after the fall of the empire, that the early church included the learning as well as the religion of the pagans in its ban, is undeniable; but on this point truth prevailed. It was preserved by many school-books, in many popular compilations from classic authors, and was accepted by many ecclesiastics. St. Augustine did not deny the sphericity of the earth. It was assumed by Isidor of Seville, and taught by Bede.[320] The schoolmen buttressed the doctrine by the authority of Aristotle and the living science which the Arabs built upon the Almagest. Gerbert, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Dante, were as familiar with the idea of the earth-globe as were Hipparchus and Ptolemy. The knowledge of it came to Columbus not as an inspiration or an invention, but by long, unbroken descent from its unknown Grecian, or pre-Grecian, discoverer. [Illustration: THE RECTANGULAR EARTH. Sketched in the _Bollettino della Società geografica italiana_ (Roma, 1882), p. 540, from the original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. The representation of this sketch of the earth by Cosmas Indicopleustes more commonly met with is from the engraving in the edition of Cosmas in Montfaucon’s _Collectio nova patrum_, Paris, 1706. The article by Marinelli which contains the sketch given here has also appeared separately in a German translation (_Die Erdkunde bei den Kirchenvätern_, Leipzig, 1884). The continental land beyond the ocean should be noticed.]