Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c12.29

c12.29

This concludes Ptolemy’s account of the geography of India. He is, unfortunately, of little use for our purpose, for his great work is mathematical, not descriptive, and throws little or no light upon the condition of India in his day. "His object," says McCrindle, "in composing it, was not, like that of the ordinary geographer, to describe places, but to correct and reform the map of the world in accordance with the increased knowledge which had been acquired of distant countries and with the improved state of science. He therefore limits his treatise to an exposition of the geometrical principles on which geography should be based and to a determination of the position of places on the surface of the earth by their latitude and longitude.” “It differs from Strabo’s production,” he adds, “as the skeleton does from the living body.”