'RECENT GEOGRAPHICAL PROGRESS. 39 



2 a year, a large permanent capital, and an annual income of $35,000. 

 It has a building of its own, a tine library and map room, and is able to 

 send, and lias frequently sent out expeditions for geographical explora- 

 tion and discovery, sometimes in cooperation with the government, 

 and sometimes without it. Before, however, it reached this state it 

 had, as I have been informed, to struggle for some years, as we have 

 bad, to keep up its organization. The turning-point of its history, 

 and in its influence, appears to have been the election, in 1843, of Sir 

 Roderick I. Murchison to the presidency, then in the fullness of his 

 fame as a geologist, but who thenceforth entered upon a new field, and 

 one by which he was afterward chiefly known. In his first annual ad- 

 dress, an elaborate and exhaustive production, he surveyed the then 

 state of geographical research throughout the world, and pointed 

 out with remarkable sagacity that the parts of the globe to which 

 exploration and research should be directed and concentrated were 

 central Africa, Australia, and the regions surrounding the north 

 and south poles. Although his own fame had been made as a geolo- 

 gist, his course" then and during the many years that he was the 

 guiding spirit of the Royal Geographical Society showed very plainly 

 his conviction that a thorough knowledge of the surface of our own 

 planet, and of those physical laws that affect everything upon it, is 

 practically of more importance to us than a knowledge of its past 

 physical history or of other bodies in space. 



It was not that he undervalued the sciences of geology and astron- 

 omy, which, in fact, form a part of the science of geography ; but the 

 earth is our own planet, the details of which are within our grasp, and 

 there is therefore the greater reason why every effort should be di- 

 rected to acquire a thorough knowledge of it, particularly as the in- 

 crease of that knowledge requires widely-extended efforts over differ- 

 ent parts of it, and a vast accumulation of details. I am not now ex- 

 pressing anything he may have said, but rather deducing my own 

 conclusions of what he thought from what he did. He was evidently 

 impressed with the conviction that sufficient attention was not then 

 given to the advancement of the science of geography, and to his emi- 

 nently practical mind it was clear that it was not to be advanced by 

 simjfly studying it in the closet, but by explorations and scientific re- 

 searches, requiring persistent efforts, continuous expenditures, and the 

 labors of a numerous, zealous, and intelligent class of workers over a 

 large part of the earth's surface. To accomplish this, the whole age 

 had to be influenced, governments enlisted, and the different societies 

 brought into active cooperation with each other, and it was to this 

 work that Sir Roderick then set himself, and to which he may be said 

 to have chiefly devoted the remainder of his life. 



I have selected Sir Roderick Murchison rather as a type, for it was 

 not to him alone, but to many other eminent men in France, Ger- 

 many, Russia, Italy, and other countries, preeminent among whom 



