674 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION FE. 
and western coasts of Africa, from Suez round the Cape of Good 
Hope to the Pillars of Hercules, charts which may be said “to 
have been drawn and coloured with drops of blood,” so terrible 
was the mortality amongst the crews before the elements of 
tropical hygiene had been learned. 
A glance at the maps of Africa in 1837 and 1897 (on the wall) 
will serve to show the marvellous progress of geographical dis- 
covery during the sixty years’ reign of Queen Victoria. Egypt, 
to the Second Cataract on the Nile, the Barbary States, and part 
of Abyssinia were amongst the limited portions of that dark 
continent then known to Europeans. Little was known of South 
Africa, beyond the Orange River north of Capetown, prior to 
1837, when Sir James Alexander made a journey through 
Namaqualand of 1,500 miles; with these few exceptions the 
map of Africa was a blank. Cartographers had laid down the 
imaginary mountains of the moon, stretching almost across the 
continent from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and also another 
range which they called “ Laputa, or the backbone of the world,” 
features that we now know had no existence. Nearly all the 
ancient maps were drawn from imagination, and I dare say many 
of our modern maps of the land boom period were more or less so, 
as many of us know to our cost. 
Very little of the interior of this great Australian continent 
was known in 1837. Hume had discovered in 1824 one of our 
largest rivers, which bore his name for many years, but which 
Captain Charles Sturt subsequently traced to the sea from its 
junction with the Murrumbidgee in 1829-1830, naming its lower 
portion after Sir George Murray, the second president cf the 
Royal Geographical Society of England. Sir Thomas aS 
then Surveyor-General of this Colony (New South Wales), i 
1836 discovered Australia Felix, now the colony of Vicious 
Numerous exploring parties were in the field in these early years, 
and a town called Melbourne was laid out in 1837 on the north 
bank of the river Yarra, in what was then, and for many years 
afterwards, in New South Wales territory. Grey and Lushington’s 
expedition on the north-west coast of Australia was in pro- 
gress, and the rest of the map. central, northward, and westward, 
like that of Africa was an unknown blank. 
The interior of Australia has, thanks to the munificent generosity 
of the late Sir Thomas Elder, and Messrs. Horn, Calvert, and 
Carnegie in a lesser degree, been opened up, save a few patches of 
desert in the west, entirely within the period under review. 
Nowhere has more heroism been shown by explorers, and no 
explorers have received scantier recognition by the public than 
those who have made known the interior of the “only entirely 
British continent.” The names of Eyre, Hume, Sturt, Leichhardt, 
the two Gregories, Macdouall, Stuart, Burke and Wills, Forrest, 
