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After the writers mentioned in the last chapter a long interval elapsed without any progress
being made in the knowledge of the shape or configuration of the earth. From the fall of the
Roman Empire, whose colonies themselves gave a certain knowledge of geography, down to the
fifteenth century, when the great impetus was given to discovery by the adventurous voyagers
of Spain and Portugal, there was nothing but servile copying from ancient authors, who were
even misrepresented when they were not understood. Even the peninsula of India was only
known by the accounts of Orientals and the writings of the Ancients until the beginning of the
fifteenth century. Vague notions, too, were held as to the limits of Africa, and even of Europe
and Asia—while of course they knew nothing of America, in spite of their marking on their maps
an antichthonal continent to the south.
Denys, the traveller, a Greek writer of the first century, and Priscian, his Latin commentator of
the fourth, still maintained the old errors with regard to the earth. According to them the earth
is not round, but leaf-shaped; its boundaries are not so arranged as to form everywhere a
regular circle. Macrobius, in his system of the world, proves clearly that he had no notion that
Africa was continued to the south of Ethiopia, that is of the tenth degree of N. latitude. He
thought, like Cleanthus and Crates and other ancient authors, that the regions that lay nearest
the tropics, and were burnt by the sun, could not be inhabited; and that the equatorial regions
were occupied by the ocean. He divided the hemisphere into five zones, of which only two were
habitable. "One of them," he said, "is occupied by us, and the other by men of whose nature we
are ignorant."
Orosus, writing in the same century (fourth), and whose work exercised so great an influence
on the cosmographers of the middle ages and on those who made the maps of the world during
that long period, was ignorant of the form or boundaries of Africa, and of the contours of the
peninsulas of Southern Asia. He made the heavens rest upon the earth.
S. Basil, also of the fourth century, placed the firmament on the earth, and on this heaven a
second, whose upper surface was flat, notwithstanding that the inner surface which is turned
towards us is in the form of a vault; and he explains in this way how the waters can be held
there. S. Cyril shows how useful this reservoir of water is to the life of men and of plants.
Diodorus, Bishop of Tarsus, in the same century, also divided the world into two stages, and
compared it to a tent. Severianus, Bishop of Gabala, about the same time, compared the world
to a house of which the earth is the ground floor, the lower heavens the ceiling, and the upper,
or heaven of heavens, the roof. This double heaven was also admitted by Eusebius of Cæsaræa.
In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries science made no progress whatever. It was still
taught that there were limits to the ocean. Thus Lactantius asserted that there could not be
inhabitants beyond the line of the tropics. This Father of the Church considered it a monstrous
opinion that the earth is round, that the heavens turn about it, and that all parts of the earth
are inhabited. "There are some people," he says, "so extravagant as to persuade themselves
that there are men who have their heads downwards and their feet upwards; that all that lies
down here is hung up there; that the trees and herbs grow downwards; and that the snow and
hail fall upwards.... Those people who maintain such opinions do so for no other purpose than
to amuse themselves by disputation, and to show their spirit; otherwise it would be easy to
prove by invincible argument that it is impossible for the heavens to be underneath the earth."
(Divine Institution). Saint Augustin also, in his City of God, says: "There is no reason to believe
in that fabulous hypothesis of the antipodes, that is to say, of men who inhabit the other side of
the earth—where the sun rises when it sets with us, and who have their feet opposed to ours."
... "But even if it were demonstrated by any argument that the earth and world have a spherical
form, it would be too absurd to pretend that any hardy voyagers, after having traversed the
immensity of the ocean, had been able to reach that part of the world and there implant a
detached branch of the primæval human family."
In the same strain wrote S. Basil, S. Ambrose, S. Justin Martyr, S. Chrysostom, Procopius of
Gaza, Severianus, Diodorus Bishop of Tarsus, and the greater number of the thinkers of that
epoch.
Eusebius of Cæsaræa was bold enough on one occasion to write in his Commentaries on the
Psalms, that, "according to the opinion of some the earth is round;" but he draws back in
another work from so rash an assertion. Even in the fifteenth century the monks of Salamanca
and Alcala opposed the old arguments against the antipodes to all the theories of Columbus.
In the middle of the sixteenth century Gregory of Tours adopted also the opinion that the
intertropical zone was
Fig. 36.
"If," they say, "the earth were square, its shadow on the moon would be square also.
"If the earth were triangular, its shadow, during an eclipse of the moon, would also be
triangular.
Fig. 37.
"If the earth had six sides, its shadow would have the same figure.
Fig. 38.
"Since, then, the shadow of the earth is round, it is a proof that the earth is round also."
This of course is one of the proofs that would be employed in the present day for the same
purpose.
The most remarkable of all the fantastical systems, however, the chef d'œuvre of the
cosmography of that age, was the famous system of the square earth, with solid walls for
supporting the heavens. Its author was Cosmas, surnamed Indicopleustes after his voyage to
India and Ethiopia. He was at first a merchant, and afterwards a monk. He died in 550. His
manuscript was entitled "Christian Topography," and was written in 535. It was with the object
of refuting the opinions of those who gave a spherical form to the earth that Cosmas composed
his work after the systems of the Church Fathers, and in opposition to the cosmography of the
Gentiles. He reduced to a systematic form the opinions of the Fathers, and undertook to explain
all the phenomena of the heavens in accordance with the Scriptures. In his first book he refutes
the opinion of the sphericity of the earth, which he regarded as a heresy. In the second he
expounds his own system, and the fifth to the ninth he devotes to the courses of the stars. This
mongrel composition is a singular mixture of the doctrines of the Indians, Chaldeans, Greeks,
and Christian Fathers.
With respect to his opponents he says, "There are on all sides vigorous attacks against the
Church," and accuses them of misunderstanding Scripture, being misled by the eclipses of the
sun and moon. He makes great fun of the idea of rain falling upwards, and yet accuses his
opponents of making the earth at the same time the centre and the base of the universe. The
zeal with which these pretended refutations are used proves, no doubt, that in the sixth century
there were some men, more sensible and better instructed than others, who preserved the
deposit of progress accomplished by the Grecian genius in the Alexandrian school, and defended
the labours of Hipparchus and Ptolemy; while it is manifest that the greater number of their
contemporaries kept the old Indian and Homeric traditions, which were easier to understand,
and more accessible to the false witness of the senses, and not improved by combination with
texts of Scripture misinterpreted. In fact, cosmographical science in the general opinion
retrograded instead of advancing.
According to Cosmas and his map of the world, the habitable earth is a plane surface. But
instead of being supposed, as in the time of Thales, to be a disc, he represented it in the form
of a parallelogram, whose long sides are twice the shorter ones, so that man is on the earth like
a bird in a cage. This parallelogram is surrounded by the ocean, which breaks in in four great
gulfs, namely, the Mediterranean and Caspian seas, and the Persian and Arabian gulfs.
Beyond the ocean in every direction there exists another continent which cannot be reached
by man, but of which one part was once inhabited by him before the Deluge. To the east, just
as in other maps of the world, and in later systems, he placed the Terrestrial Paradise, and the
four rivers that watered Eden, which come by subterranean channels to water the post-diluvian
earth.
After the Fall, Adam was driven from Paradise; but he and his descendants remained on its
coasts until the Deluge carried the ark of Noah to our present earth.
On the four outsides of the earth rise four perpendicular walls, which surround it, and join
together at the top in a vault, the heavens forming the cupola of this singular edifice.
The world, according to Cosmas, was therefore a large oblong box, and it was divided into
two parts; the first, the abode of men, reaches from the earth to the firmament, above which
the stars accomplish their revolutions; there dwell the angels, who cannot go any higher. The
second reaches upwards from the firmament to the upper vault, which crowns and terminates
the world. On this firmament rest the waters of the heavens.
Cosmas justifies this system by declaring that, according to the doctrine of the Fathers and
the Commentators on the Bible, the earth has the form of the Tabernacle that Moses erected in
the desert; which was like an oblong box, twice as long as broad. But we may find other
similarities,—for this land beyond the ocean recalls the Atlantic of the ancients, and the
Mahomedans, and Orientals in general, say that the earth is surrounded by a high mountain,
which is a similar idea to the walls of Cosmas.
Fig. 41.—Explanation of
Sunrise.
Similar to this were the ideas of other doctors of the Church, such as S. Hilary and Theodorus,
some of whom supposed that the angels carried the stars on their shoulders like the omophores
of the Manichees; others that they rolled them in front of them or drew them behind; while the
Jesuit Riccioli, who made astronomical observations, remarks that each angel that pushes a star
takes great care to observe what the others are doing, so that the relative distances between
the stars may always remain what they ought to be. The Abbot Trithemus gives the exact
succession of the seven angels or spirits of the planets, who take it in turns during a cycle of
three hundred and fifty-four years to govern the celestial motions from the creation to the year
1522. The system thus introduced seems to have been spread abroad, and to have lingered
even into the nineteenth century among the Arabs. A guide of that nationality hired at Cairo in
1830, remarked to two travellers how the earth had been made square and covered with
stones, but the stones had been thrown into the four corners, now called France, Italy, England,
and Russia, while the centre, forming a circle round Mount Sinai, had been given to the
Arabians.
Alongside of this system of the square was another equally curious—that of the egg. Its
author was the famous Venerable Bede, one of the most enlightened men of his time, who was
educated at the University of Armagh, which produced Alfred and Alcuin. He says: "The earth is
an element placed in the middle of the world, as the yolk is in the middle of an egg; around it is
the water, like the white surrounding the yolk; outside that is the air, like the membrane of the
egg; and round all is the fire which closes it in as the shell does. The earth being thus in the
centre receives every weight upon itself, and though by its nature it is cold and dry in its
different parts, it acquires accidentally different qualities; for the portion which is exposed to the
torrid action of the air is burnt by the sun, and is uninhabitable; its two extremities are too cold
to be inhabited, but the portion that lies in the temperate region of the atmosphere is habitable.
The ocean, which surrounds it by its waves as far as the horizon, divides it into two parts, the
upper of which is inhabited by us, while the lower is inhabited by our antipodes; although not
one of them can come to us, nor one of us to them."