According to Achilles Tatius, Xenophanes gave to the earth the shape of an immense inclined plane, which stretched out to infinity. He drew it in the form of a vast mountain. The summit only was inhabited by men, and round it circulated the stars, and the base was at an infinite depth. Hesiod had before this obscurely said: "The abyss is surrounded by a brazen barrier; above it rest the roots of the earth." Epicurus and his school were well pleased with this representation. If such were the foundations of the earth, then it was impossible that the sun, and moon, and stars should complete their revolutions beneath it. A solid and indefinite support being once admitted, the Epicurean ideas about the stars were a necessary consequence; the stars must inevitably be put out each day in the west, since they are not seen to return to the place whence they started, and they must be rekindled some hours afterwards in the east. In the days of Augustus, Cleomedes still finds himself obliged to combat these Epicurean ideas about the setting and rising of the sun and stars. "These stupid ideas," he says, "have no other foundation than an old woman's story--that the Iberians hear each night the hissing noise made by the burning sun as it is extinguished, like a hot iron in the waters of the ocean." Modern travellers have shown us that similar ideas about the support of the earth have been entertained by more remote people. Thus, in the opinion of the Greenlanders, handed down from antiquity to our own days, the earth is supported on pillars, which are so consumed by time that they often crack, and were it not that they are supported by the incantations of the magicians, they would long since have broken down. This idea of the breaking of the pillars may possibly have originated in the known sinking of the land beneath the sea, which is still going on even at the present day. [Illustration: FIG. 31.--EGYPTIAN REPRESENTATION OF THE EARTH.] An ancient Egyptian papyrus in the library of Paris gives a very curious hieroglyphical representation of the universe. The earth is here figured under the form of a reclining figure, and is covered with leaves. The heavens are personified by a goddess, which forms the vault by her star-bespangled body, which is elongated in a very peculiar manner. Two boats, carrying, one the rising sun, and the other the setting sun, are represented as moving along the heavens over the body of the goddess. In the centre of the picture is the god, Maon, a divine intelligence, which presides over the equilibrium of the universe. We will now pass on from the early ideas of the general shape and situation of the world to inquire into the first outlines of geographical knowledge of details.