He fails most in endeavouring to give a general and combined idea of the earth; even where his separate sketches are clear and accurate, when united they lose both their accuracy and clearness.  He seems to doubt whether he should divide the world into three parts; and at last, having admitted such a division, he makes the rivers Phasis and Araxes, and the Caspian Sea, the boundaries between Europe and Asia; and to Europe he assigns an extent greater than Asia and Libya taken together.  His knowledge of the west of Europe was very imperfect:  in some part he fixes the Cassiterides, from which the Phoenicians derived their tin.  The Phoenician colony of Gadez was known to him.  His geography extended to the greater part of Poland and European Russia.  Such appear to have been its limits with respect to Europe; and such the general notion he entertained of this quarter of the world.  As to Asia, he believed that a fleet sent by Darius had circumnavigated it from the Indus to the confines of Egypt; but though his general idea of it was thus erroneous, he possessed accurate information respecting it from the confines of Europe to the Indus.  Of the countries to the east of that river, as well as of the whole of the north and southern parts of it, he was completely ignorant.  He particularly notices that the Eastern Ethiopians, or Indians, differ from those of Africa by their long hair, as opposed to the woolly head of the African.  In his account of India he interweaves much that is fabulous; but in the same manner as modern discoveries in geography have confirmed many things in Herodotus which were deemed errors in his geography, so it has been ascertained that even his fables have, in most instances, a foundation in fact.  With regard to Africa, his knowledge of Egypt, and of the country to the north of it, seems to have been very accurate, and more minute and satisfactory than his knowledge of any other part of the world.  It is highly probable that he was acquainted with the course of the western branch of the Nile, as far as the 11th degree of latitude.  He certainly knew the real course of the Niger.  On the east coast of Africa he was well acquainted with the shores of the Arabian Gulph; but though he sometimes mentions Carthage, and describes the traffic carried on, without the intervention of language, between the Carthaginians and a nation beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which we nave already mentioned in treating of the commerce of the Carthaginians, yet he seems to have been unacquainted with any point between Carthage and the Pillars of Hercules.

In the history of Herodotus, there is an account of a map constructed by Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, when he proposed to Cleomenes, king of Sparta, to attack Darius, king of Persia, at Susa; from this account, the vague, imperfect, and erroneous ideas entertained in his time of the relative situations and distances of places, as well as of the extremely rude and feeble advances which had been made towards the construction of maps, may be inferred.  Major Rennell, in his Illustrations of Herodotus, has endeavoured to ascertain from his history the parallel and meridian of Halicarnassus, the birth-place of the historian.  According to him, they intersect at right angles over that town, cutting the 37th degree of north latitude, and the 45-1/2 of east longitude, from the Fortunate Islands.