Sparta, to attack Darius, king of Persia, at Susa; from this account, the
vague, imperfect, and erroneous ideas entertained in his time of the
relative situations and distances of places, as well as of the extremely
rude and feeble advances which had been made towards the construction of
maps, may be inferred. Major Rennell, in his Illustrations of Herodotus,
has endeavoured to ascertain from his history the parallel and meridian of
Halicarnassus, the birth-place of the historian. According to him, they
intersect at right angles over that town, cutting the 37th degree of north
latitude, and the 45-1/2 of east longitude, from the Fortunate Islands.

For a considerable period after the time of Herodotus, the ancients seem to
have been nearly stationary in their knowledge of the world. About 368
years before Christ, Eudoxus, of Cnidus, whose desire of studying astronomy
induced him to visit Egypt, Asia, and Italy, who first attempted to explain
the planetary motions, and who is said to have discovered the inclination
of the moon's orbit, and the retrograde motion of her nodes, is celebrated
as having first applied geographical observations to astronomy; but he does
not appear to have directed his researches or his conjectures towards the
figure or the circumference of the earth, or the distances or relative
situations of any places on its surface.

Nearly about the same period that Eudoxus died Aristotle flourished. This
great philosopher, collecting and combining into one system of geographical
knowledge the discoveries and observations of all who had preceded him,
stamped on them a dignity and value they had not before possessed, as well
as rendered them less liable to be forgotten or misapplied: he inferred the
sphericity of the earth from the observations of travellers, that the stars
seen in Greece were not visible in Cyprus or Egypt; and thus established
the fundamental principle of all geography. But though this science, in its
most important branch, derived much benefit from his powerful mind, yet it