As far as his ideas can be reduced to a system, the earth was a flat disk, around which flowed the river Ocean. The accompanying plan will enable the reader to form an adequate conception of the Homeric geography. The radius of the territories described by Homer with any degree of precision was hardly three hundred miles in length. Hesiod, who lived a century after Homer, thus states the scientific attainments of his time:--"The space between the heavens and the earth is exactly the same as that between the earth and Tartarus beneath it. A brazen anvil, if tossed from heaven, would fall during nine days and nine nights, and would reach the earth upon the tenth day. Were it to continue its course towards the abode of darkness, it would be nine days and nine nights more in accomplishing the distance." It is worth while remarking that this statement is at variance with that of Homer, who makes Vulcan, when precipitated from heaven by Jupiter, land at Lemnos in a single day: he had travelled, therefore, nearly twenty times faster than one of his own anvils. Hesiod intended to convey, by this illustrations, an imposing idea of the loftiness of the heavens. In the eyes of modern astronomy, nothing can be more paltry. The time that an anvil thrown from Halcyon, the brightest star of the Pleiades, towards our globe, would require to reach it, may perhaps be imagined from the fact that the rays of light emitted by Halcyon travel five centuries before they strike the earth! It is thus that the positive revelations of modern science surpass in marvels the most daring inventions of ancient fable. [Illustration: THE EARTH ACCORDING TO ANAXIMANDER.] Anaximander, four hundred years after Homer, held that the earth, instead of being flat, was in the form of a cylinder, convex upon its upper surface. Its diameter was three times greater than its height; and its form was round, as if it had been shaped by a turner's lathe. The Oracle of Delphi was the centre of his system. Somewhat later, Thales, one of the Seven Sages, declared his belief that the earth was spherical, and remained suspended in mid air without support of any kind. This frightful doctrine made few proselytes: it was not likely, indeed, that any one but a sage would adopt a theory which made him the inhabitant of a globe abandoned and isolated in the midst of space.