Note 5 — Chapter I · THE STRAITS OF GIBRALTAR.

The Straits were the pivot of Cicero’s cosmography. In the Tusculan Disputations, commemorating the wonders of nature, he speaks of “the globe of the Earth standing forth out of the Sea, fixed in the middle space of the universal World, habitable and cultivated in two distant regions; that which we inhabit being placed under the axis towards the seven stars; the other region, the Australian, unknown to us; the remainder uncultivated, stiffened with cold, or burnt up with heat.”