Scientific Reviews. 181 



intervallo, and hence Mr. Williams needs not to be surprized if 

 this work be less popular, if popular at all, than his two preceding 

 publications. Though it require talents of no ordinary magnitude 

 to compose a well- arranged, close-connected, and perspicuous nar- 

 rative, it requires but very ordinary mental powers to follow it, the 

 road being rendered smooth and easy. But in discussion the case 

 is quite different. It requires no great labour to read and under- 

 stand the historical works of a Hume and a Ferguson, a Robertson 

 and a Gibbon, but to read, where one is perpetually compelled to 

 think, the philosophical works of a Hume, an Edwards, and a 

 Brown, hie labor, hoc opus est. Where the mind is kept in a state 

 of continual tension, the exertion is painful, and can only be duly 

 appreciated by those who have been accustomed to such toil, and 

 to examine what they read. Without the former, the latter is 

 comparativel)' useless. It is an old and true adage, " that much 

 reading stores the memory." Memoria augilur excolendo is in the 

 mouth of every schoolboy, and is carefully inculcated on his mind 

 as a necessary preliminary to literary excellence. But it would be 

 equally proper to inculcate another maxim. Judicium augitur ex- 

 colendo, — the necessity of cultivating the judgment, — that mental 

 power which enables us to discriminate what we read and what we 

 remember, and by the habitual exercise of which we become gra- 

 dually fitted to encounter works where much discussion is necessa- 

 rily required, and that with comparative ease. The study of com- 

 parative geography is an arduous task, and requires no common 

 powers. Both worlds, if we may so speak, must, as it were, be 

 brought together before the mental eye, and both must be accu- 

 rately viewed before we can understand the mutual corresponden- 

 cies, and fit them accordingly. But this can only be done by him, 

 who, by painful labour and study, has made himself well acquaint- 

 ed with both. The study of each by itself is easy ; but to make 

 them reflect mutual light is the grand difficulty. Two great im- 

 pediments have hitherto opposed the successful study of that branch 

 of knowledge, — the comparative ignorance of the ancients them- 

 selves in geographical science, their unacquaintance with the geo- 

 graphy of such countries as lay without the limits of their own 

 country at the time they wrote, — and the confused, rambling, in- 

 determinate, and inconsistent language which they use, when the 

 geography of particular countries is the subject, whether inciden- 

 tally or professedly. The second great obstacle is modern igno- 

 rance, not of geographical science, for of that there is no lack, but 

 of many of the countries mentioned in ancient history, and describ- 

 ed by the ancient geographers. As we are well acquainted with 

 the geography of most of Europe, not however of all Europe, the 

 task of identifying the ancient with the modern geography, has 

 been rendered comparatively easy, as in the countries of Italy, Gaul, 

 Spain, most of Germany, and Gfreat Britain, all within the bounds 

 of the Roman empire, and of which accurate surveys have beep made 

 successively since the era of Julius Caesar. But as we advance east- 



