country of the "Tchin" dynasty, which ruled over the whole of China in the second century before Christ, and over a portion of it for a much longer time. The name "Seres," on the other hand, was always associated with the trade in silks, and was known to the Romans in the time of the Emperor Claudius,1 and somewhat earlier. The Romans in Virgil's time set a high value upon silk, and every scrap of it they had came from China. They knew nothing about the silk-worm, and supposed that the fibres or threads of this beautiful stuff grew upon trees. Of actual intercourse between the Roman and Chinese empires there was no more than is implied in this current of trade, passing through many hands. But that each knew, in a vague of the existence of the other, there is no way, doubt.2 In the course of the reign of Justinian, we get references at first hand to India, and coupled withal to a general theory of cosmography. 1 The name "Seres" appears on the map of Pomponius Mela (cir. A. D. 50), while "Sina" does not. See below, P. 350. Jam Tartessiaco quos solverat æquore Titan Silius Italicus, lib. vi. ad init. 2 For this whole subject see Colonel Sir Henry Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither, London, 1866, 2 vols., -a work of profound learning and more delightful than a novel. This curious information we have in the book of the monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, written Cosmas Indi- somewhere between A. D. 530 and copleustes 550. A pleasant book it is, after its kind. In his younger days Cosmas had been a merchant, and in divers voyages had become familiar with the coasts of Ethiopia and the Persian Gulf, and had visited India and Ceylon. After becoming a monk at Alexandria, Cosmas wrote his book of Christian geography,1 main 1 Its title is Χριστιανῶν βίβλος, ἑρμηνεία εἰς τὴν Οκτάτευ χον, i. e. against Ptolemy's Geography in eight books. The name Cosmas Indicopleustes seems merely to mean “the cosmographer who has sailed to India." He begins his book in a tone of extreme and somewhat unsavoury humility: 'Avolyw τὰ μογιλάλα καὶ βραδύγλωσσα χείλη ὁ ἁμαρτωλὸς καὶ τάλας ¿y—“I, the sinner and wretch, open my stammering, stuttering lips," etc. - The book has been the occasion of some injudicious excitement within the last half century. Cosmas gave a description of some comparatively recent inscriptions on the peninsula of Sinai, and because he could not find anybody able to read them, he inferred that they must be records of the Israelites on their passage through the desert. (Compare the Dighton rock, above, p. 247.) Whether in the sixth century of grace or in the nineteenth, your unregenerate and unchastened antiquary snaps at conclusions as a drowsy dog does at flies. Some years ago an English clergyman, Charles Forster, started up the nonsense again, and argued that these inscriptions might afford a clue to man's primeval speech! Cf. Bunsen, Christianity and Mankind, vol. iii. p. 231; Müller and Donaldson, History of Greek Literature, vol. iii. p. 353; Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene, vol. ii. p. 177. Shape of the earth, accord ing to Cos mas taining, in opposition to Ptolemy, that the earth is not a sphere, but a rectangular plane forming the floor of the universe; the heavens rise on all four sides about this rectangle, like the four walls of a room, and, at an indefinite height above the floor, these blue walls support a vaulted roof or firmament, in which God dwells with the angels. In the centre of the floor are the inhabited lands of the earth, surrounded on all sides by a great ocean, beyond which, somewhere out in a corner, is the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were expelled. In its general shape, therefore, the universe somewhat resembles the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, or a modern "Saratoga trunk." On the northern part of the floor, under the firmament, is a lofty conical mountain, around which the sun, moon, and planets perform their daily revolutions. In the summer the sun takes a turn around the apex of the cone, and is, therefore, hidden only for a short night; but in the winter he travels around the base, which takes longer, and, accordingly, the nights are long. Such is the doctrine drawn from Holy Scripture, says Cosmas, and as for the vain blasphemers who pretend that the earth is a round ball, the Lord hath stultified them for their sins until they impudently prate of Antipodes, where trees grow downward and rain falls upward. As |