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A TERRESTRIAL GLOBE WITH WAFER ATTACHED TO SHOW THE VARYING CONDITIONS OF OBSERVATION IN A MIDDLE LATITUDE.

Wherever we are upon the earth we always imagine that we are on the top of it. The idea held by all the early peoples was that the earth was an extended plain: they imagined that the land that they knew and just the surrounding lands were really in the centre of the extended plain. Plato, for instance, as we have seen, was content to put the Mediterranean and Greece upon the top of his cube, and Anaximander placed the same region at the top of his cylinder.

We can very conveniently study the conditions of observation at the poles of the earth, the equator, and some place in middle latitude, by using an ordinary terrestrial globe. The wooden horizon of the globe is parallel to the horizon of a place at the top of the globe, which horizon we can represent by a wafer. In this way we can get a very concrete idea of the different relations of the observer's horizon in different latitudes to the apparent paths of the stars.