3(36 THE PROGRESS OF OEOGRAPHTC^AL KNOWLEDGE. 



USE OF THE Ti:LE(iKAI'II IN (JEOGKAPHY. 



One ot" the chief mean.s to this end is the tek^gT;ii)h. Ft'w people 

 appreciate the important role ^vhieh is played by the telegraph in 

 these da3"s in the tield of geography. It was not so very long ago 

 that the iirst step toAvard regenerating a natural wilderness, or for 

 securing access to new commercial ojx'nings or centers of uncivilized 

 population was held to be the construction of roads and railways. 

 Moans of physical access was the tirst step toward the development 

 of a country which was regarded as unenlightened from the stand- 

 point of European civilization. It is so no longer, for the telegraph 

 often threads its way through many a di'earv waste of unpeopled 

 earth, uncoiling its length for hundreds of miles in advance of any 

 railway, or indeed of any road, which can in the ordinary sense of 

 the term be described as a constructed road. 1 will give you an illus- 

 tration. On the Patagonian pampas not so vcn-y long ago, in the 

 midst of a wide wilderness of snow, after losing our way in a blinding 

 snowstorm and camping on our tracks for the night, we struck the 

 end of the telegraph line which is now being ]:)ushed across Patagonia, 

 and which will eventuall}^ connect the Atlantic with the Paciiic. We 

 had seen no roads whatever for a great part of the distance we had 

 traversed. Our daily procedure was the simple j^rocess of foLowing 

 a guide over the illimitable stretches of bush-covered uplands which 

 reach down from the eastern foot of the Andes in gentle grades to the 

 Atlantic shore; and when we did at last fall in with the great central 

 line of transcontinental communication we found it to consist of the 

 wheel marks of certain previous wagons which had drifted along that 

 way — a sort of road which it was exceedingly easy to lose in the fading- 

 light of a stormy winter's day. On this road there was nothing but a 

 telegraph end and the tents of a few telegraph officials, and we were 

 some 150 miles from our destination on the Atlantic coast. And so it 

 happened that after weeks of absence from any means of comnuinica- 

 tion with the outside world we were thus suddenly put in possession 

 of its very latest news, and the very first message that passed from 

 the end of that line into my hands was the message of peace with 

 South Africa, signed an hour or two ])reviously. I accepted that 

 message as a happy omen for th(> result of our Patagonian mission. 

 And thenceforward (thanks to the courtesy of the telegraph chief at 

 Buenos Ayres) niglitly as we sat in the snow we read all that was 

 important from the London evening ]>ap(M's of that selfsame da}'. 

 We were not starving by any means, but had we wanted a loaf of 

 bread in that unbroken stretch of snow covertnl bush land Ave certainly 

 could not have got it, while here was information lloAving in with a 

 daily ease and regularity that 1 greatly missed Avhen once again i Avas 

 Avithin reach of clubs and ciA^ilization. The importance of telegraphs 



