Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/180

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166
STRABO.
BOOK II.

beholds the sun rise and set, and attain the meridian, but without considering how this takes place. Such knowledge could not aid the object he has in view, any more than to know whether the country he chances to be in may be under the same latitude as his own or not. Even should he bestow a slight attention to the subject, on all mathematical points he will adopt the opinions of the place; and every country has certain mistaken views of these matters. But it is not for any particular nation, nor for the man of the world who cares nothing for abstract mathematics, still less is it for the reaper or ditcher, that the geographer labours; but it is for him who is convinced that the earth is such as mathematicians declare it to be, and who admits every other fact resulting from this hypothesis. He requests that those who approach him shall have already settled this in their minds as a fact, that they may be able to lend their whole attention to other points. He will advance nothing which is not a consequence of these primary facts; therefore those who hear him, if they have a knowledge of mathematics, will readily be able to turn his instructions to account; for those who are destitute of this information he does not pretend to expound Geography.

2. Those who write on the science of Geography should trust entirely for the arrangement of the subject they are engaged on to the geometers, who have measured the whole earth; they in their turn to astronomers; and these again to natural philosophers. Now natural philosophy is one of the perfect sciences.[1]

The “perfect sciences” they define as those which, depending on no external hypothesis, have the origin, and the evidence of their propositions, in themselves. Here are a few of the facts established by natural philosophers.[2]

The earth and heavens are spheroidal.

The tendency of all bodies having weight, is to a centre.

Further, the earth being spheroidal, and having the same

  1. ↑ ἡ δὲ φυσικὴ ἀρετὴ τις. We learn from the work entitled De Placitis Philosophorum, commonly attributed to Plutarch, that the Stoics dignified with the name of ἀρεταὶ, the three sciences of Physics, Ethics, and Logic, φυσικὴ, Ἠθικὴ, λογικὴ. The exact meaning of ἀρετὴ in these instances it is impossible to give, and Strabo’s own explanation is perhaps the best that can be had; we have here rendered it, “perfect science,” for want of a better phrase.
  2. ↑ φυσικοὶ.
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