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Even with cutting edge theory, geographical writers were still constrained by the empirical data, though Strabo and others severely criticized any sources whose methods and measurements were less than satisfactory. Their handling of material tended to treat geographia as a physical science or as part of historia, the enquiry into human experience in time, space, and culture (Clarke 1999: 28–29). Both approaches employed theory and logic as well as practical observation, whether theoretical physics and measurements or political principles and ethnography (Roseman 2005: 29–30). Most geographical writers used both approaches in turns. For example, Hecataeus’s Periodos gēs and Genealogiai (or Historiai) were part of the same intellectual project and cover similar topics (Clarke 1999: 60–62), and Herodotus (4.36–40) used his research on the peoples of Asia to dispute earlier cartographers’ ideas of a circular earth divided evenly between Europe and Asia. Both Pseudo-Skylax and Agatharchides of Cnidus followed the Peripatetic school, and their Periploi combine distance measurement with sometimes oddly chosen but detailed topographic, ethnographic, botanic, or zoologic descriptions (Pseudo-Skylax: Shipley 2011: 77–81, 2012: 15–17; Agatharchides: Burstein 1989: 13; Strabo 14.2.15). Even Alexander’s bematists followed the prevailing intellectual trend and added to their measurements some local details to edify their Aristotelian-trained king.