Excerpt from Historical and Geographical Notes, 1453-1869 A retrospect of four centuries, with a rapid glance at the progress of modern discovery, exploration, and invention, will probably serve as an appropriate introduction to our projected scheme of Interoceanie Communication by means of the Tehuantepec Railway, and show that the time is near at hand for its accomplishment. Let us, therefore, go back for a moment, and survey the little old world and its inhabitants as they appeared about the middle of the fifteen century. According; to Ptolemy, the best recognized authority, whose geography had stood the test of thirteen hundred years, the then known world was a strip of some seventy degrees wide, mostly north of the equator, with Cadiz on the west, and farthest India or Cathay on the cast, lying between the frozen and the burning zones, both impassable by man. The inhabitants, as far as known in Europe, were Christians and Mohamedans, the one sect about half the age of the other. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.