the most learned and enlightened men, elevated, as he supposed, above all narrow prejudice and selfish interest, and capable of comprehending the full scope of his reasonings. From the dispassionate examination of such a body of sages, he could not but anticipate the most triumphant verdict.

CHAPTER VII.

Columbus before the Council at Salamanca.

THE interesting conference took place at Salamanca, the great seat of learning in Spain. It was held in the dominican convent of St. Stephen, the most scientific college in the university, in which Columbus was lodged and entertained with great hospitality during the course of the examination. The board of conference was composed of professors of the university, together with various dignitaries of the church, and learned friars. No tribunal could bear a front of more imposing wisdom; yet Columbus soon discovered that ignorance and illiberality may sometimes lurk under the very robes of science.

The greater part of this learned junto, it would appear, came prepossessed against him, as men in place and dignity are apt to be against poor applicants. There is always a proneness to consider a man under examination as a kind of delinquent, or impostor, upon trial, who is to be detected and exposed. Columbus, too, appeared in a most unfavourable light before a scholastic body; an obscure navigator, member of no learned institution, destitute of all the trappings and circumstances which sometimes give oracular authority to dulness, and depending upon the mere force of natural genius. Some of the assembly entertained the popular notion

that he was an adventurer, or, at best, a visionary; and others had that morbid impatience of any innovation upon established doctrine, which is apt to grow upon dull and pedantic men in cloistered life. The hall of the old convent presented a striking spectacle. A simple mariner standing forth in the midst of an imposing array of clerical and collegiate sages; maintaining his theory with natural eloquence, and, as it were, pleading the cause of the new world. We are told, that when he began to state the grounds of his theory, the friars of St. Stephen alone paid attention to him. The others appeared to have intrenched themselves behind one dogged position, namely, that, after so many profound philosophers had occupied themselves in geographical investigations, and so many able navigators had been voyaging about the world for ages, it was a great presumption in an ordinary man to suppose that there remained such a vast discovery for him to make.

Several of the objections opposed by this learned body have been handed down to us, and have provoked many a sneer at the expense of the university of Salamanca; but they are proofs rather of the imperfect state of science at the time, and of the manner in which knowledge, though rapidly advancing, was still impeded in its progress by monastic bigotry. Thus, at the very threshold of the discussion, Columbus was assailed with citations from the Bible, and the works of the early fathers of the church, which were thought incompatible with his theory: doctrinal points were mixed up with philosophical discussions, and even a mathematical demonstration was allowed no truth, if it appeared to

clash with a text of scripture, or a commentary of one of the fathers. Thus the possibility of the existence of antipodes in the southern hemisphere, though maintained by the wisest of the ancients, was disputed by some of the sages of Salamanca, on the authority of Lactantius and St. Augustine, those two great luminaries of what has been called the golden age of ecclesiastical learning. "Is there any one so foolish," asks Lactantius, "as to believe that there are antipodes with their feet opposite to ours; people who walk with their heels upward and their heads hanging down? That there is a part of the world in which all things are topsy-turvy; where the trees grow with their branches downward, and where it rains, hails, and snows upwards? idea of the roundness of the earth," he adds, the cause of inventing this fable; for these philosophers having once erred, go on in their absurdities, defending one with another."

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Objections of a graver nature, and more dignified tone, were advanced on the authority of St. Augustine. He pronounces the doctrine of antipodes incompatible with the historical foundations of our faith; since to assert that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of the globe would be to maintain that there were nations not descended from Adam, it being impossible for them to have passed the intervening_ocean. This would be, therefore, to discredit the Bible, which expressly declares, that all men are descended from one common parent.

Such were the unlooked-for prejudices which Columbus had to encounter, at the very outset of his conference, and which certainly savour more of the convent than the university. To his simplest

proposition, the spherical form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of scripture. In the Psalms, the heavens are said to be extended over the earth like a hide, that is to say, like the covering of a tent, which, among the ancient pastoral nations, was formed of the hides of animals; St. Paul also, in his epistle to the Hebrews, compares the heavens to a tabernacle or tent spread over the earth: hence these casuists maintained that the earth must be flat, like the bottom of the tent. Others admitted the globular form of the earth, and the possibility of an opposite and inhabitable hemisphere, but maintained that it would be impossible to arrive there in consequence of the heat of the torrid zone. As for steering to the west in search of India, they observed that the circumference of the earth must be so great as to require at least three years to the voyage, and those who should undertake it must perish of hunger and thirst, from the impossibility of carrying provisions for so long a period. Not the least absurd objection advanced was, that should a ship even succeed in reaching the extremity of India, she could never get back again, for the rotundity of the globe would present a kind of mountain, up which it would be impossible for her to sail with the most favourable wind.

Such are specimens of the errors and prejudices, the mingled error and erudition, with which Columbus had to contend, throughout the examination of his theory. Many of these objections, however, which appear so glaringly absurd at the present day, were incident to the imperfect state of knowledge of the time. The rotundity of the earth was as yet a matter of mere speculation: no one could tell