[Footnote 317: Such views have their advocates even now. There still lives, I believe, in England, a certain John Hampden, who with dauntless breast maintains that the earth is a circular plane with centre at the north pole and a circumference of nearly 30,000 miles where poor misguided astronomers suppose the south pole to be. The sun moves across the sky at a distance of about 800 miles. From the boundless abyss beyond the southern circumference, with its barrier of icy mountains, came the waters which drowned the antediluvian world; for, as this author quite reasonably observes, "on a globular earth such a deluge would have been physically Impossible." Hampden's title is somewhat like that of Cosmas,--_The New Manual of Biblical Cosmography_, London, 1877; and he began in 1876 to publish a periodical called _The Truth-Seeker's Oracle and Scriptural Science Review_. Similar views have been set forth by one Samuel Rowbotham, under the pseudonym of "Parallax," _Zetetic Astronomy. Earth not a Globe. An experimental inquiry into the true figure of the earth, proving it a plane without orbital or axial motion_, etc., London, 1873; and by a William Carpenter, _One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe_, Baltimore, 1885. There is a very considerable quantity of such literature afloat, the product of a kind of mental aberration that thrives upon paradox. When I was superintendent of the catalogue of Harvard University library, I made the class "Eccentric Literature" under which to group such books,--the lucubrations of circle-squarers, angle-trisectors, inventors of perpetual motion, devisers of recipes for living forever without dying, crazy interpreters of Daniel and the Apocalypse, upsetters of the undulatory theory of light, the Bacon-Shakespeare lunatics, etc.; a dismal procession of long-eared bipeds, with very raucous bray. The late Professor De Morgan devoted a bulky and instructive volume to an account of such people and their crotchets. See his _Budget of Paradoxes_, London, 1872.] [Footnote 318: Cosmas, ii. 138. Further mention of China was made early in the seventh century by Theophylactus Samocatta, vii. 7. See Yule's _Cathay_, vol. i. pp. xlix., clxviii.] [Sidenote: The Nestorians.]