480 GEOGRAPHIC CONQUESTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



Prjewalski madr four sopunitc journeys to wcstcin China, and in the 

 iniportanco and extont of his explorations in the heart of the vast 

 eontiiuMit has l)een e(piah»d by none exe(>i)t Sven Hedin. Kichthof(>n 

 and Punipolly in China, Rockhill in Ti])et, Forsyth in P>ast Turkestan, 

 and the faithful, ploddino- pundits of the trioononietiical survey of 

 India north of the Himalayas, are a few of the many men who have 

 eontributed nnich to the proo-ress of o-eographic knowledge of Asia. 



Fii;. ]•_'. — Asiii as known in ]'.»(M). 



CONCLUSION. 



The progress of geograi)hy during th(^ nineteenth century has thus 

 opened to the Avhite man almost every eorner in the inmiense. diverse 

 world of which he is a part. But the even more startling advance in 

 geographic sciences, or, more truly, the creation of these sciences dur- 

 ing the century, has nearly explained iho maimer of origin and the 

 formation of the world itself. Geolog}', which describes the nature 

 and forming of the earth's crust, tells of glacial action, and by means 

 of fossils proves that the earth millions and millions of years ago 

 was covered with life; meteorologv, which studies the conditions gov- 

 erning the heav}' and yet light mantle of the earth; oceanography, 

 which is beginning to explore the lands beneath the oceans, are all 

 geographic conquests of the nineteenth century. The " Dark Conti- 

 nent" at the beginning of the twentieth century is that inuncnse land 

 surface buried beneath the oceans, an area thrice thc^ area of the 

 exposed land surface. Maur^^ and Murra}^ and the soimdings for 

 submarine cables have but scratched the surface as with a pin. To 

 solve the many mysteries which the oceans hide is the problem of the 

 explorer of the tw^entieth centur3^ 



