In the city of Salamanca there assembled in the Dominican convent of San Esteban, in the year 1487, a learned and orthodox conclave, summoned by Prior Fernando de Talavera, to pronounce judgment on the theory propounded by Columbus; and to decide whether in that most catholic of Christian kingdoms, on the very eve of its final triumph over the infidel, it was a permissible belief that the Western World had even a possible existence. Columbus set before them the scientific demonstration which constituted for himself indisputable evidence of an ocean highway across the Atlantic to the continent beyond. The clerical council included professors of mathematics, astronomy, and geography, as well as other learned friars and dignitaries of the Church: probably as respectable an assemblage of cloister-bred pedantry and orthodox conservatism as that fifteenth century could produce. Philosophical deductions were parried by a quotation from St. Jerome or St. Augustine; and mathematical demonstrations by a figurative text of Scripture; and in spite alike of the science and the devout religious spirit of Columbus, the divines of Salamanca pronounced the idea of the earth’s spherical form to be heterodox; and declared a belief in antipodes incompatible with the historical traditions of the Christian faith: since to assert that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of the globe would be to maintain that there were nations not descended from Adam, it being impossible for them to have passed the intervening ocean.