20 DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENTS OF COOK AND PEARY. 



regions of the earth had to offer become insistent in the human 

 mind. 



Columbus was one of the chief pioneers in this field. It was 

 not so much personal benefit that he had in view as the wish to learn 

 what secrets the great western ocean might hide in its mysterious 

 depths. It was this that spurred him to his mighty task, the wander- 

 lust of which to-day we hear so much, the thirst to discover, the 

 fame he might gain, that moved this famous navigator. And it is 

 this same spirit that has moved the Cooks and Peary and others of 

 like type in our own day to cross a new unknown ocean to learn 

 what secrets lay hid in its mystic depths. 



Never before as within the last and the present centuries was 

 this eagerness to penetrate the unknown regions of the earth so 

 vital in men's minds. During the few centuries before there was 

 something like it in the eagerness with which the new-discovered 

 continent of America \vas explored. But in this it was the search 

 for gain that chiefly moved the explorers. The Spanish conquerors 

 traversed the south in search of gold, the French adventurers ex- 

 plored the north in quest of furs, the British in the mid-realm were 

 engaged in making themselves new homes in the western wilder- 

 ness. Few of all these were moved by that pure desire to learn the 

 secrets of the earth which has been largely the inspiring spirit of 

 recent discovery. 



Within the past hundred years this spirit has manifested itself 

 as never before. As if ashamed to admit that there was so much 

 of our little planet remaining unknown, after the many millenniums 

 of man's esistence upon the earth, adventurers set out on all sides 

 burning with the desire to discover the earth so far as it was still 

 unrevealed. There was much still to discover. Of the great conti- 

 nent of Africa, almost nothing was unknown beyond the immediate 

 coast. Asia, the greatest of the continents, held a multitude of 

 mysterious secrets. Even America, actively as it had been trodden 

 and explored for four centuries, had vast areas on which the foot 



