128 LECTURES. • 



the best existing authority, their works must be considered as the 

 very type of the knowledge of the age. Their maps make an epoch 

 for every country which they touched upon, and may sometimes pre- 

 serve to us features for which every other authority is lost. 



It is observable in the history of every art, but especially in the art 

 of map-making, in which so much indolent and servile copying has 

 been going on^, that the real work is done by a comparatively few in- 

 ventive and ingenious minds ; and it must be our particular care to 

 find out those men and those maps which, in any respect, have taken 

 the lead. 



Sometimes we cannot use all that such a man has left us, but only 

 a few of his productions. Thus, for instance, we would not use all 

 the maps of Hondius ; but to leave out those which he compn)sed of 

 Guiana, for the discoveries of Sir Walter Raleigh, or for the voyages 

 of Drake and Cavendish, would be an unpardonable omission. 



So, too, we might dispense with most of the maps of the French 

 geographer Robert de Vaugondy ; but we ought not to neglect his 

 atlas of the Arctic polar sea, which gained him so much celebrity. 

 In the same manner other geographers_, like the painters, had their 

 favorite subjects and their master-pieces. Only a few, like Ortelius or 

 D'Anville, deserve that everything they produced should be collected. 



With some we must not be content with a single edition of their 

 maps, but must endeavor to procure them all; because each issue was 

 caretuUy revised and augmented with new discoveries, so that every 

 one of these additions is a mark of progress. 



The productions of the few great and learned geograjjhers who 

 took upon themselves the painful business of map compiling were 

 afterwards, when once published, coj)ied and recopied by a host of 

 manufacturers of all nations A D'Anville was edited and. re-edited, 

 in England, in Germany, in the Netheidands, sometimes tolerably 

 well_, and sometimes very ill; sometimes with additions and so-called 

 corrections, and sometimes without; sometimes under his own name, 

 and sometimes under the name of his })lunderer. And frequently these 

 copies were copied again in distant countries; and thus the light which 

 D'Anville threw on the configuration of our world, became at each 

 remove from the original more diifasied and obscure. 



To adopt into our collection all these copies of copies would be 

 worse than useless ; though even here an exception may occasionally 

 be made. Some mere map manufacturers were so very active, and 

 managed to introduce their productions so generally into the market, 

 that they played from this very circumstance an important part in the 

 history of geography. They were introduced into schools, libraries, 

 commercial towns^ and even into the ships of navigators. They 

 exercised, not a very well deserved or beneficial, but a very important 

 influence on the spread of geographical knowledge, and even on navi- 

 gation and the progress of discovery, and they therefore must not 

 quite escape our attention. 



Numberless maps have been constructed, not merely with want of 

 care, but with the evident intention of falsifying geography. The 

 reasons for doing this have been manifold. Sometimes learned men 

 have represented the position of places or the configuration of coun- 



