Rowbotham never adequately explains his alternative astronomy. He attacks the concept of a plurality of worlds because no other world than this one is mentioned in the Bible. He uses Ussherian Biblical chronology to mock the concept that stars could be millions of light years away. Heaven is not a state of mind, it is a real place, somewhere above us. Hell is exactly as advertised, directly below us. Zetetic cosmology is ‘faith-based’, based, that is, on a literal interpretation of selected Biblical quotes. Eclipses can be explained by some unknown object occulting the sun or moon. The moon is both self-illuminated and semi-transparent. The sun orbits the north pole once a day at a constant altitude. The Zetetic Sun, moon, planets and stars are all only a few hundred miles above the surface of the earth. I think that by the 19th century people would have noticed if Australia and Africa were thousands of miles further apart than expected, let alone if Africa was wider than it was long! The Zetetic map has a severly squashed South America and Africa, and Australia and New Zealand in the middle of the Pacific. Figure 54 inadvertantly illustrates this problem. The polar projection of the flat earth creates obvious discrepancies with known geography, particularly the farther south you go. What we call the North Pole is in the center of the earth. The lands we know are surrounded by an infinite wilderness of ice and snow, beyond the Antarctic ocean, bordered by an immense circular ice-cliff. The contients float on an infinite ocean which somehow has a layer of fire underneath it. Rowbotham believed that the earth is flat. Rowbotham hints at the incident in this book. The judge ruled against Hampton, who started a long campaign of legal harassment of Wallace.
An experiment which Hampden proposed didn’t resolve the issue, and the two ended up in court in 1876. One of them, John Hampden, got involved in a bet with the famous naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace about the flat earth. Rowbotham was an accomplished debater who reputedly steamrollered all opponents, and his followers, who included many well-educated people, were equally tenacious. The third edition of 1881 (which had inflated to 430 pages) was used as the basis of this etext. This book, in which he lays out his world system, went through three editions, starting with a 16 page pamphlet published in 1849 and a second edition of 221 pages published in 1865. Samuel Birley Rowbotham, under the pseudonym ‘Parallax’, lectured for two decades up and down Britain promoting his unique flat earth theory.
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