EARTH’S SHAPE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 December 1938, Page 8

EARTH’S SHAPE

ANCIENTS WHO BELIEVED IT ROUND. Columbus did not prove that the earth is round, as were were painfully taught in school. He Gid not even try io; he just took it for granted, as did all educated men of his time. The sphericity of the earth has been an accepted thing in the minds of scholars for many centuries. Even in the socalled "Dark Ages” really well-in-formed persons were mostly "roundearthers.” The idea of a spherical earth was familiar to Greek philosophers from the fifth century B.C. onwards, declares Dr William Arthur Heidel, of Connecticut Wesleyan University. Even before tban, some philosophers said things that have been interpreted as indicating belief in the rotundity of the earth, but Dr Meidel is not able to find anything really unequivocal earlier than the writings of Plato. In one of Plato's reports of a purported discussion by Socrates, the earlier philosopher (who had been Plato’s teacher) is made to express the belief ‘that the earth is really round and at the centre of the heavens." This statement is made after an inquiry about the writings of Anaxagoras, implying that the question whether the earth is round or flat was a subject of lively debate at that time. Two later Greeks, Philo and Phytheas, who wrote about 300 8.C., apparently made critical geographic and geodetic studies bearing on the sphericity of the earth. Philo was a navy man who served in Egypt and, on the Red Sea, and Phytheas made his studies in what was. for the Greeks, the Far North. The theories formed in these early days, the evidence in their support, were never lost. They survived through the Middle Ages, and were a part of the cultural equipment of the navigator from Genoa, Columbus.