GEOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATIONS AND DISCOVERIES IN 1871. 



333 



large numbers of the sick into his chateau, 

 and he and Madame de Gasparin cared for 

 them with the utmost tenderness and devotion. 

 His exertions at this time contributed materi- 

 ally to break down his health, already feeble, 

 and, when the news of the outrages of the 

 Communists was added to his other cares and 

 troubles, he sank rapidly, and, though brought 

 to Geneva in the hope of improvement to his 

 health, he did not rally. His principal pub- 

 lished works were : " A Treatise on Mort- 

 gages " (1834) ; " Slavery and the Slave Trade" 

 (1838); "The General Interests of French 

 Protestantism" (1843); "A Defence of the 

 Scriptures " (1854) ; " The Turning Tables," 

 2 vols. (1854), a work on the table-tipping ex- 

 citement, in which, while admitting the reality 

 of the phenomenon, he attributed it to an un- 

 known but purely physical force; "The Ques- 

 tion of Neufchatel " (1857) ; " The Uprising of 

 a Great People, or the United States in 1861 " 

 (1862); "America before Europe" (1862); 

 "Moral Liberty" (1868); five or six volumes 

 of the discussions already mentioned (1865- 

 '70) ; and " An Appeal to Patriotism and Good 

 Sense" (1871), addressed to the French people, 

 urging them not to continue the war with Ger- 

 many. 



GEOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATIONS AND 

 DISCOVERIES IN 1871. Notwithstanding 

 the meagre promise of the previous year, and 

 the small number of geographical .enterprises 

 then known to be in progress, the year 1871 

 has been one remarkable for the fruitful results 

 of previous discoveries ; and these not in the 

 old and beaten track of geographical explora- 

 tions, so much as in new and hitherto unex- 

 plored or but imperfectly-explored regions. 

 It has been rather in the heights of Central 

 Asia, in the region of the Pamir Steppe, the 

 cities of Yarkand and Kashgar, the deep 

 cafions of the Upper Himalaya and Kuen-lun 

 ranges, the lakes that not more than three or 

 four Europeans have ever visited, and in that 

 secluded region where the boundaries of Chi- 

 na, Thibet, Burmah, and Cambodia join, and 

 where all the large rivers of Southern Asia 

 have their source, that the great Asiatic dis- 

 coveries of 1870-'71 have been made. In Af- 

 rica, while there has been much anxiety to 

 hear more definitely from Dr. Livingstone, 

 and to learn something of the progress of the 

 Anglo-Turkish pacha, Sir Samuel Baker, and 

 his army in the region of the Albert Nyanza, 

 it has been from neither of these that the 

 freshest geographical knowledge of the inte- 

 rior of Africa has been received, but from Dr. 

 Schweinfurth, a German explorer who has 

 penetrated into the country of the cannibal 

 Nyam-Nyams, the men whose caudal append- 

 ages have been thought so signally to illus- 

 trate the theories of Lord Monboddo and Mr. 

 Darwin. In South America, the explorations 

 have been far up among the tributaries of the 

 principal affluents of the Amazons, and in the 

 interior of the hitherto almost unknown region 



of British Guiana. In our own country the 

 repeated reconnoissances into the region about 

 the head-waters of the Yellowstone, the Madi- 

 son, and the Gallatin, and the second explora- 

 tion of that fearful canon of the Colorado, 

 have revealed wonders unsurpassed on the 

 surface of our globe. So, too, in Polynesia, it 

 has not been the old and tolerably well-known 

 groups of islands which have been revisited 

 and newly explored, but the comparatively 

 unknown New Caledonian group which has 

 commanded our attention. In arctic explo- 

 ration, though the " Great Polynia," or Open 

 Polar Sea, is not yet discovered, nor perhaps 

 been proved to exist, yet lesser Polynise on 

 the eastern coast of Greenland have been 

 opened up to the view of explorers, with an 

 unexpected wealth of animal life ; the eastern 

 islands of the Spitzbergen group have been re- 

 discovered, and their mountains climbed, and 

 once again under more favorable circumstances 

 than of old. Spitzbergen itself has been occu- 

 pied this time as a scientific station, whence 

 to make the effort for further polar discov- 

 eries. 



But, before proceeding to give the details of 

 these and other geographical discoveries of 

 the year, it is proper that we should notice 

 the ravages-made by death in the ranks of the 

 geographers. For the last thirty years no 

 name has been more illustrious, alike in geo- 

 graphical and geological science, than that of 

 Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (See MURCHI- 

 SON, in this volume), the founder and for many 

 years the President of the Royal Geographical 

 Society of London. He passed away at the 

 ripe age of eighty, in the full possession of his 

 great intellectual powers, on the 22d of Octo- 

 ber, 1871. Hardly less illustrious, in his par- 

 ticular department as a chartographer, was 

 Dr. Alexander Keith Johnston, whose maps, 

 atlases, and works on physical and political 

 Geography, had entitled him to the highest 

 renown. He received from the Royal Geo- 

 graphical Society, on the 22d of May, 1871, the 

 Patron's or Victoria Medal for his contribu- 

 tions to geographical science (Sir Roderick 

 Murchison being awarded at the same time the 

 Founder's Medal), but died on the llth of July 

 following (see JOHNSTON, A. K, in this volume). 

 Other names distinguished in geography and 

 its kindred sciences, who died during the year, 

 were : WILHELM RITTER VON HAIDINGER, an em- 

 inent German geographer and geologist, who 

 died on the 19th of March, 1871 (see HAIDIN- 

 GER) ; Sir WILLIAM THOMAS DENISON, who had 

 been Governor of Madras and temporarily Gov- 

 ernor-General of India ; M. GUILLAUME LEJEAN, 

 an eminent French geographer and explorer, 

 and for some years secretary of the Societe de la 

 Geographie of Paris, who died in April ; and, 

 of those who were engaged in geographical 

 explorations, Mr. GEORGE W. HAYWARD, the 

 intrepid explorer of the Pamir Steppe, who was 

 murdered July 17, 1870, at Darkut, in Eastern 

 Toorkistan, but the intelligence of his death 



