21 FEBRUARY 1936, Page 20

[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sia,—Who are these mysterious

fifteenth-century men of Miss Gilbert-Lodge's who still imagined that the earth was Hat ? Plato (a fifth-century—n.c.—nitin) 'described it as '– spherical: A second-century man called Ptolemy held the same view with a wealth of corroborative detail. A fourteenth.; century man, Dante, whose works were widely read, appears' to have had no doubts on the matter, and another called Chaucer wrote a Treatise on the Astrolabe for his young son, Lewis, which must have puzzled a little flat-earther