I50 



NA TURE 



\yune 6, 1878 



awakened to modern geographical enterprise, these great 

 features of Central Africa Mere known ; Herodotus had 

 an inkling of them, and Ptolemy all but located the cen- 

 tral lakes. These modern explorers deserve the glory of 

 first discorerers as much as Columbus deserves that of 

 discoverer of America. 



Without then detracting from the originality of the 

 work of modern explorers, it is evident that from the 

 fifteenth century onwards some travellers whose names 

 have fallen into oblivion but who may have been com- 

 panions of Diego Cam and Martin Behaim, ventured into 

 the heart of Africa; followed certain arteries of com- 

 munication and discovered the course of the Congo ; 

 geography kept posse'ssion of these discoveries for two 

 centuries and gave them as articles of faith ; besides, in 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many Portu- 

 guese, Capuchins or simple traders, entered anew the 



interior, published the same facts, sometimes with cor- 

 rections and additions. 



Father Ricioli, a Jesuit and very intelligent man, 

 furnished the Fathers Placide, of St. Amien, and Cres- 

 pinien, two laborious monks, with documents to prepare 

 the Lyons globe, in 1701. The actual constructor of the 

 globe seems to have been the celebrated Lyons me- 

 chanician, Henri Marchand, in religion P^re Gregoire, 

 a Franciscan, with the help of the Venetian Contarini, 

 a pupil of Nolin, belonging to the Flemish cartographic 

 system. Evidently this was the last word of science. 

 Fig. 3 is a much reduced copy of the facsimile made from 

 the globe by M. Deloncle, the reporter of the commission 

 we have alluded to- 



How came it that just about the same time, about 1700, 

 one of the princes of modern geography, Guillaume 

 Delisle, was so badly inspired as to reconstruct an alto- 



FiG. I, — Portion cf a Spanish Globe of 1530-4O) found in the National Library, Paris. 



gether New Africa in which he accumulated heresy on 

 heresy? The Central lakes, the immense reservoirs 

 of the Nile, disappear at one stroke of the pen ; as to 

 the Congo it is no longer connected with the lakes of 

 the interior, although it is allowed to retain a little of its 

 semicircular direction. The error accredited by a cele- 

 brated geographer like Delisle made way. The old map 

 of Africa was demolished stone by stone, so to speak. 

 In short the work was so well done that, after having piled 

 nonsense upon nonsense, for the sake of peace, all was 

 expunged; after having believed in tribes with dog- 

 heads, placed a few anthropophagi everywhere, and con- 

 founded countries situated a thousand miles from each 

 other, they ended by making a tabula rasa and leaving a 

 white space where formerly were rightly placed the great 

 lakes and sources of the Nile. Yet a few years and here 

 was geography doubting, denying, and ridiculing the 



follies of our predecessors. The students of geography 

 of the period of 1840-50 were too much on their guard to 

 commit the colossal blunder at that period of making the 

 Nile issue from the lakes to the south of the equator. 

 "So far as concerns a part of Africa," to quote M, R. 

 Cortambert, in the article in La Nature, "the past has 

 been resuscitated : 'old things have become new.' That 

 which was laughed at yesterday is taken seriously to-day. 

 Then, my friends, these good ancestors of the fifteenth 

 and sixteenth centuries, who counted among them 

 Columbus, Gama, Magellan, and many other conquerors 

 of the world, have not, perhaps, left altogether to their 

 descendants of the nineteenth century the glory of invent- 

 ing geography." 



From the report of the Lyons Commission we learn 

 that the following works were probably accessible to the 

 Flemish map-makers, and later to the constructors of the 



