146 



GEOGRAPHY 



or only very partially preserved in the records of 

 later writers. Strabo's great work on geography, 

 which is said to have been composed when he was 

 eighty years of age, has been considered as a model 

 of what such works should be in regard to the 

 methods of treating the subject ; but, while his 

 descriptions of all the places he has himself visited 

 are interesting and instructive, he seems unduly to 

 have discarded the authority of preceding writers. 



The wars and conquests of the Romans had a 

 most important bearing upon geography, since the 

 practical genius of the Roman people led them to 

 the study of the material resources of every pro- 

 vince and state brought under their sway ; and the 

 greatest service was done to geographical know- 

 ledge by the survey of the empire, which was begun 

 by Julius Caesar, and completed by Augustus. This 

 work comprised a description and measurement of 

 every province by the most celebrated geometricians 

 of the day. Pliny ( born 23 A.D. ), who had travelled 

 in Spain, Gaul, Germany, and Africa, has left us 

 a compendium of the geographical and physical 

 science of his age in the four books of his 

 Historia Naturalis which he devotes to the sub- 

 ject. He collected with indefatigable industry the 

 information contained in the works of Sallust, 

 Caesar, and others, to which he added the results 

 of his own observations, without, however, dis- 

 criminating between fact and fiction. The progress 

 that had been made since Cfesar's time in geo- 

 graphical knowledge is evinced by Pliny's notice 

 of arctic regions and of the Scandinavian lands, 

 and the accounts which he gives of Mount Atlas, 

 the course of the Niger, and of various settlements 

 in different parts of Africa ; while his knowledge 

 of Asia is more correct than that of any of his pre- 

 decessors, for he correctly affirms that Ceylon is 

 an island, and not the commencement of a new 

 continent, as had been generally supposed. 



The study of geography in ancient times may 

 be said to have terminated with C. Ptolemy, who 

 flourished in the middle of the 2d century of 

 our era. His work on Geography, in eight books, 

 which continued to be regarded as the most 

 perfect system of the science through the dark 

 and middle ages down to the 16th century, gives 

 a tolerably correct account of the well-known 

 countries of the world, and of the Mediter- 

 ranean, Euxine, and Caspian, together with the 

 rivers which fall into those seas ; but it added 

 little to the knowledge of the north of Europe, or 

 the extreme boundaries of Asia or Africa. Yet, 

 from his time till the 14th century, when the 

 records of the travels of the Venetian Marco Polo 

 opened new fields of inquiry, the statements of 

 Ptolemy were never questioned, and even during 

 the 15th century it was only among a few German 

 scholars at Nuremberg that the strange accounts 

 given of distant eastern lands by the Venetian 

 traveller were received as trustworthy where he 

 differed from Ptolemy. Marco Polo had, however, 

 unfortunately made no astronomical observations, 

 nor had he even recorded the length of the day at 

 anyplace, and hence the Nuremberg geographers, 

 who nad no certain data for estimating the extent 

 of the countries which he had traversed, were the 

 means of propagating errors which led to results 

 that were destined to influence the history of man- 

 kind. For, taking Ptolemy's tables as their 

 basis, they incorporated on their globes and maps 

 the results of their own rough estimates of the 

 length of Marco Polo's days' journeys, and they 

 thus represented the continent of Asia as extend- 

 ing across the Pacific, and having its eastern 

 shores somewhere in the region of the Antilles. 

 These erroneous calculations misled Christopher 

 Columbus to the false assumption that, by sailing 

 120 W., he would reach the wealthy trading marts 



of China, and the result of this conviction was his 

 entering upon that memorable expedition which 

 terminated in the discovery (in 1492) of the con- 

 tinent of America. Although there can be no 

 doubt that the American continent was visited in 

 the 9th and 10th centuries by Northmen, the event 

 remained without influence on the history of dis- 

 covery, and cannot therefore detract from the 

 claims of Columbus. This momentous discovery, 

 which had been preceded in 1486 by the exploration 

 of the African coast as far as the Cape of Good 

 Hope (which was doubled by Vasco da Gama in 

 1497), was followed by a rapid succession of dis- 

 coveries. Within thirty years of the date of 

 the first voyage of Columbus the whole coast of 

 America from Greenland to Cape Horn had been 

 explored, the Pacific Ocean had been navigated, 

 and the world circumnavigated by Magellan (q.v. ) 

 the coasts of eastern Africa, Arabia, Persia, and 

 India had been visited by the Portuguese, and 

 numerous islands in the Indian Ocean discovered. 



The 16th century was marked by continued 

 attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to extend 

 the sphere of oceanic discovery ; and the desire 

 to reach India by a shorter route than those of 

 the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn led to- 

 many attempts to discover' a north-west passage, 

 which, though they signally failed in their object, 

 had the effect of very materially enlarging our 

 knowledge of the arctic regions. The expedi- 

 tions of Willoughby aud Frobisher in 1553 and 

 1576, of Davis (1585), Hudson (1607), and Baffin 

 (1616), were the most important in their result* 

 towards this end. The 17th and 18th centuries 

 gave a new turn to the study of geography, by 

 bringing other sciences to bear upon it, which, 

 in their turn, derived elucidation from the exten- 

 sion of geographical knowledge ; and it is to- 

 the aid derived from history, astronomy, and the 

 physical and natural sciences that we owe the 

 completeness which has characterised modern works 

 on geography. In the 17th century the Dutch, 

 under Tasman and Van Diemen, made the Austral- 

 asian islands known to the civilised world ; and in 

 the latter half of the 18th century Captain Cook 

 (q.v.) extended the great oceanic explorations by 

 the discovery of New Zealand and many of the 

 Polynesian groups, and by proving the non-exist- 

 ence of a ' great Antarctic continent,' stretching far 

 north in the Pacific. The antarctic lands were first 

 visited in 1840 by American, English, and French 

 expeditions, under their respective commanders, 

 Wilkes, Ross, and Dumont d'Urville. Polar ex- 

 ploration, after having been for a time in abeyance, 

 has within late years been vigorously prosecuted by 

 the United States and various European countries ; 

 and in 1879-80 Baron Nordenskjold succeeded for 

 the first time in history in navigating the north- 

 east passage round Europe and Asia. In America 

 the travels of Humboldt, Lewis and Clark, Fre- 

 mont, and others, and the work of the United 

 States and Canadian Surveys, of the Argentine 

 government explorers, and of railway pioneers, 

 have done much to make us acquainted with broad 

 general features, but much remains to be done in 

 regard to special districts of central and southern 

 America. In Asia numerous travellers, geographers, 

 and naturalists, combined with the expeditions of 

 Russian armies, and explorers like the late General 

 Prejevalsky, have contributed to render our know- 

 ledge precise and certain in respect to a great 

 part of the continent, whose natural characteristics 

 have been more especially represented by the great 

 physicist Ritter ; while we owe a large debt of 

 gratitude to the Jesuit missionaries, whose in- 

 defatigable zeal has furnished us with a rich mass 

 of information in regard to minor details of Asiatic 

 life and nature, nor must the work of the Indian 



