in his geography, and puts them in ultima Thule or Shetland), and
tells us, over and above the reindeer-skin dresses, that the women
never nursed their children, but went out hunting with their
husbands, hanging the papoose up to a tree, as the Lapps do now, with
a piece of deer's marrow in its mouth to keep it employed; and
moreover, that they sacrificed their captives to a war-god (Mars he
calls him) in cruel ugly ways. All which we may fully believe.

Then Paul has to tell us how in the Scritfin country there is little
or no night in midsummer, little or no day in winter; and how the
shadows there are exceeding long, and shorten to nothing as they
reach the equator,--where he puts not merely Egypt, but Jerusalem.
And how on Christmas days a man's shadow is nine feet long in Italy,
whereas at Totonis Villam (Thionville), as he himself has measured,
it is nineteen feet and a half. Because, he says, shrewdly enough,
the further you go from the sun, the nearer the sun seems to the
horizon. Of all which if you answer--But this is not history: I
shall reply--But it is better than history. It is the history of
history. It helps you to see how the world got gradually known; how
history got gradually to be written; how each man, in each age, added
his little grain to the great heap of facts, and gave his rough
explanation thereof; and how each man's outlook upon this wondrous
world grew wider, clearer, juster, as the years rolled on.

And therefore I have no objection at all to listen to Paul in his
next chapter, concerning the two navels of the ocean, one on each
side Britain--abysses which swallow up the water twice a day, and
twice a day spout it up again. Paul has seen, so he seems to say,
the tide, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], that
inexplicable wonder of the old Greeks and Romans, running up far