Gervase tells of the discovery of another mouth of Hell near Pozzuoli in southern Italy.[952] A bishop John of Pozzuoli was said to have discovered a pond whose waters were opaque but would become clear and translucent when oil was thrown upon them. Exploring about its shores one day, the bishop heard the sounds of lamentation coming from beneath the waters and, casting oil upon them, was horrified to behold, far down in the depths, the gateway to the infernal regions! Elsewhere[953] Gervase tells of a lake on the summit of Mount Cavagum (Canigou) in Catalonia, inhabited by devils, who raise a storm when stones are thrown in to disturb them. CHAPTER IX THE LANDS The inquiring curiosity of men as well as of children is not first stimulated by those things which seem most usual and commonplace. The latter are taken for granted. Science originates rather in the wonder aroused by the extraordinary or by the impressive. Only after a long process of development does it turn to the study of the homely and the obvious. The truth of this is illustrated in the medieval geography of the lands. Geomorphology, or the science of land forms, was very much in its infancy during our period and for many centuries thereafter. Only rarely did the man of the Middle Ages seek for an explanation of the origin of the familiar features of the earth’s surface which he saw around him day by day. If he described a landscape in terms that often reveal love of its beauty or, at least, appreciation of its productive capacity, he was almost totally blind to the possibilities of profounder analysis of its nature. A plain was a plain, a valley a valley because God had made it so. The present chapter will deal mainly with the character of these external, unscientific descriptions of land forms. The attempt will be made, however, to point out a few notable exceptions to the general rule, a few cases where men sought for a deeper meaning in the aspects of nature than the meaning written upon the surface. _CLASSIFICATION OF LAND AREAS_ QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE SUBDIVISIONS There are two ways of subdividing and classifying areas of land, the quantitative and the qualitative. Adelard of Bath gives us an example of a quantitative subdivision where he tells in his _De eodem et diverso_[954] that the inventor of geometry split the known world into parts (or, perhaps, continents), the parts into provinces, the provinces into regions, the regions into localities, the localities into territories, the territories into fields, the fields into centuries, and the centuries into _jugera_ (acres).