Geography, a name given to those inhabitants of the globe that live diametrically opposite to each other. The word is Greek, and compounded of ὁπή, opposite, and πόδας, a foot; because their feet are opposite to each other.

The antipodes lie under opposite meridians and opposite parallels; in the same degree of latitude, but of opposite denominations, one being north and the other south. They have nearly the same degree of heat and cold, days and nights of equal length, but in opposite seasons. It is noon to one, when midnight to the other; and the longest day with the one, is the shortest with the other.

Plato is esteemed the first who thought it possible that the antipodes subsisted, and is looked upon as the inventor of the word. As this philosopher apprehended the earth to be spherical, he had only one step to make to conclude the existence of the antipodes.

The ancients, in general, treated this opinion with the highest contempt; never being able to conceive how men and trees could subsist suspended in the air with their feet upwards, for so they apprehended they must be in the other hemisphere.

They never reflected that these terms upwards and downwards are merely relative; and signify only nearer to, or farther from, the centre of the earth, the common centre to which all heavy bodies gravitate; and that, therefore, our antipodes have not their feet upwards and head downwards any more than ourselves; because they, like us, have their feet nearer the centre of the earth, and their heads farther from it. To have the head downwards and feet upwards, is to place the body in a direction of gravity tending from the feet to the head; but this cannot be supposed with regard to the antipodes; for they, like us, tend toward the centre of the earth, in a direction from head to foot.