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The Irish shaved the head in a semicircle from temple to temple, while the Latin usage was to shave the crown, leaving an external circle of hair to typify the crown of thorns. Boniface, the sphericity of the earth and the existence of antipodes.
The Fathers of the Church had denied the sphericity of the earth, and since the earth was not round they declared that a voyage of circumnavigation was absolutely contrary to the Bible, and could not therefore, on any logical theory, be undertaken.
So strongly had this false opinion taken possession of the minds of men, in our European world, even after the revival of learning in the west, that Galileo was imprisoned by the holy inquisitors at Rome for asserting the sphericity of the earth, and the doctrine of antipodes, and had to redeem his liberty and life, by writing a refutation of that heretical doctrine, which satisfied the inquisitors, yet convinced the world of its truth.
That the earth was a round globe of land and water was a fact that, after many contradictions and uncertainties, intelligent men had by this time accepted. A conscious knowledge of the world as a whole had been a part of human thought for many hundreds of years; and the sphericity of the earth had been a theory in the sixth century before Christ.
One of them has the size and smoothness and plump sphericity of a balloon of the biggest pattern. The road led through a forest of great gum-trees, lean and scraggy and sorrowful. The road was cream-white a clayey kind of earth, apparently. Along it toiled occasional freight wagons, drawn by long double files of oxen.
Even among the ancients, though many of their geometricians had acknowledged the sphericity of the globe, it was for a long time imagined that the earth was a third longer than it was broad, and thence arose the terms of longitude and latitude. St. Athanasius expresses himself most warmly against astronomers.
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