Note 400 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

Strabo, i. 65. Bunbury, Ancient Geography, i. 627, says the passage is unfortunately mutilated, but the words preserved can clearly have no other signification. What is left to us of Eratosthenes are fragments, which were edited by Seidel, at Göttingen, in 1789; again and better by Bernhardy (Berlin, 1822). Bunbury (vol. i. ch. xvi.) gives a sufficient survey of his work and opinions. The spherical shape of the earth was so generally accepted by the learned after the times of Aristotle and Euclid, that when Eratosthenes in the third century, B.C. went to some length to prove it, Strabo, who criticised him two centuries later, thought he had needlessly exerted himself to make plain what nobody disputed. Eratosthenes was so nearly accurate in his supposed size of the globe, that his excess over the actual size was less than one-seventh of its great circle.