Note 65 — Chapter IV

The doctrines attributed to Virgil, and their condemnation by Pope Zachary, have been examined by Decker, a professor of Louvain, who shows very clearly that the error lay, not in their maintaining the existence of the antipodes, but in the notion of a race distinct from that of Adam. Feller, in the account he gives of the matter in his Historical Dictionary, refers to the teaching of Bede, who, he declares, denied the spherical figure of the earth. But the work from which he quotes is not to be found among the writings of our English saint, whose real opinion on the subject may be seen from the following explicit passage: “We call the earth a globe, not that it is absolutely the perfect form of a globe, by reason of the unevenness of hills and plains, but because its whole compass, if comprehended within the circumference of lines, would make the figure of a globe.”—De Nat. Rer. c. xlvi. 118.