But the essential point is that in less than half a century Europe had practically comprehended America as an addition to the known world.

There was but a brief twilight interval between nescience and knowledge.

How different was the case with Australia! Three hundred years after the date of Columbus' first voyage, the mere outline of this continent had not been wholly mapped.
During the middle ages, when ingenious men exercised infinite subtlety in speculation, and wrote large Latin folios to prove each other wrong in matters about which neither party knew anything at all, there was much dissertation about the possibility of antipodes.

Bishops and saints waxed eloquent upon the theme.

The difficulty of conceiving of lands where people walked about with their heads hanging downwards, and their feet exactly opposite to those of Europeans, was too much for some of the scribes who debated "about it and about." The Greek, Cosmas Indicopleustes, denounced the "old wives' fable of Antipodes," and asked how rain could be said to "fall," as in the Scriptures, in regions where it would have to "come up"* (* The Christian Topography of Cosmas, translated by J.W.McCrindle, page 17 (Hakluyt Society).) Some would have it that a belief in Antipodes was heretical.