I may premise by observing that this land very much resembles in shape an oak leaf, being much longer than it is broad; towards the top it inclines to the left, while it terminates in the form of an Amazonian buckler, in which the spot at the central projection is the place called Cocinthos, while it sends forth two horns at the end of its crescent-shaped bays, Leucopetra on the right and Lacinium on the left. It extends in length one thousand and twenty miles, if we measure from the foot of the Alps at Prætoria Augusta, through the city of Rome and Capua to the town of Rhegium, which is situated on the shoulder of the Peninsula, just at the bend of the neck as it were. Its breadth is variable, being four hundred and ten miles between the two seas of the far north. At about the middle, and in the vicinity of the city of Rome, from the spot where the river Aternus flows into the Adriatic sea, to the mouth of the Tiber, the distance is one hundred and thirty-six miles, and a little less from Castrum-novum on the Adriatic sea to Alsium on the Tuscan; but in no place does it exceed two hundred miles in breadth. CHAPTER X. THE HYPERBOREANS. In the far North, beyond the Riphæan[20] mountains, is the region known by the name of Pterophoros,[21] because of the perpetual fall of snow there, the flakes of which resemble feathers; a part of the world which has been condemned by the decree of nature to lie immersed in thick darkness; suited for nothing but the generation of cold, and to be the asylum of the chilling blasts of the northern winds.