SIXTY YEARS OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 675 
Giles, Lindsay, Wells, Landsborough, the Honorable D. W. Car- 
negie, and others, are too unfamiliar to English, and, indeed, 
Australian readers also, although nearly all have been honoured 
by Geographical authorities, and the romance of their exploits 
will some day let us hope be adequately told by an Australian 
historian. 
The great island of New Guinea has been to a large extent 
explored by the British, Dutch, and Germans, who administer its 
various divisions and the present Lieutenant-Governor, Sir William 
Macgregor, “ has earned for himself a place in the history of the 
island only comparable to that of Livingstone in the history of 
Africa.” Mr. Theodore F. Bevan has also done good work in 
British New Guinea as an explorer. The success of the expedi- 
tion was largely due to the perseverance and indomitable energy 
of Mr. Lawrence Hargrave, who accompanied D’Alberti on his 
expedition up the Fly River, as engineer of the steam launch. 
In South America vast tracks of country were entirely unknown 
and the courses of the many navigable rivers in the interior were 
undiscovered sixty years ago. In the Indian and Pacific Oceans 
many islands were practically unknown and little or nothing of 
New Guinea—as I have said before—had been explored. 
Time will not admit of my doing more than merely glancing at 
one aspect of the progress of Geography during the sixty years of 
the Victorian era ; and perhaps the best aspect is that of discovery 
and exploration for in it British work has been preeminent. 
The problems of general scientific geography formulated by the 
President of the Royal Geographical Society in 1837 and put 
forward by him as deserving of immediate attention are to a dis- 
couraging extent still problems of the future. This has been 
largely due to the lack of international co-operation, and the 
mutual independence of the workers in different countries—a 
state of things which the development of international congresses 
in recent years may be hoped soon to improve. 
Until James Clarke Ross’s expedition in 1839, nothing was 
known of the Antarctic region, except where Cook had reached 
the 70th° and Weddell the 74th° parallel of south latitude. 
The history of Antarctic discovery opened with the accession 
of Queen Victoria to the throne. Ross, who had previously spent 
eight winters inthe Arctic—and had passed no less than sixteen 
navigable seasons in the polar regions, left England in 1839 and 
crossed the Antarctic circle on the first day of January, 1840. 
“Tn the short space of one month made one of the greatest 
geographical discoveries of modern times—amid regions of per- 
pectual ice he discovered a southern continent which he named 
South Victoria Land—two volcanoes, one of which in a state of 
active eruption, 12,400 feet high, he named after his ship the 
