276 GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE. 



Alfred the Great, King of the Anglo-Saxons (849 901), who, like 

 Charlemagne, was a sovereign of great organizing powers, took a special 

 interest in these studies, and set an example to his subjects by making him- 

 self acquainted, with a view to developing the fisheries and trade, with the 

 islands and coasts washed by the Baltic and the North Seas. Two travelling 

 traders, one a Dane named Wolfstan, the other a Norwegian named Other, 

 wrote an account of their maritime explorations. Wolfstan had explored the 

 Baltic coast, and Other had navigated to the polar seas by way of the coasts of 

 Norway and of Lapland. Alfred the Great, who translated into Saxon the 

 " Universal History " by Orosius, written in the fifth century, added to it, from 

 the accounts given by Wolfstan and Other, the description of an immense 

 extent of country which the Romans had but caught a glimpse of athwart 

 the miraculous stories of a few sailors who had sought to reach the mysterious 

 island of Thule (Iceland), which was looked upon as the extreme limit of the 

 habitable globe. It was owing to him that there were prepared pilots' charts, 

 to enable fishermen to exercise their industry in the remote regions of the 

 Norwegian continent (Figs. 198 and 199), and to establish a carrying trade 

 with all the ports of the Baltic. Geography, in England as in Germany, 

 consisted at that time of a few rudimentary but practical notions. Thus a 

 canon of Bremen composed, in 1067, a brief description of Denmark, under 

 the pretentious title of "Geographia Scandinaviae ; " while, two hundred years 

 before, an Irish monk, Dicuil, wrote a regular treatise on general geography 

 entitled, " De Mensura Orbis " (Concerning the Extent of the Universe) 

 borrowed from the Latin writers, Pliny, Solinus, Orosius, and Priscian, 

 supplement 3d by some novel remarks upon the northern countries. But this 

 treatise, though it contains an account as to the discovery of Iceland and 

 other interesting facts in contemporary history which the monks had 

 imparted to the author, also contained several errors, but little in the way of 

 commentary. For instance, Dicuil divides the world into three parts, 

 Europe, Asia, and Libya, in which latter he places the source of the Nile, not 

 far from the Atlantic, in the mountains of Mauritania. 



There are doubtless but few geographical works during the tenth and 

 eleventh centuries which place the theory of the science in a reliable form, 

 but it may be taken as certain that geography itself was taught wherever 

 education existed. The Greek schools in the empire of the East could not 

 afford to neglect a study which was inseparable from that of history and of 



