444 



NATURE 



{Sept. 8, 1 88 1 



integral poi'tions of scientific geography.^ Of these none is 

 more important than that of the distribution of animals and 

 plants, «hich further recommends itself to yoa on this occasion 

 from being a subject that owes its great progress during the last 

 half-century as much to the theories advanced by celebrated 

 voyagers and travellers as to their observations and collections. 



Before, however, I proceed to offer you a sketch of the pro- 

 gress made during the lifetime of the Association in this one 

 branch, I must digress to remind you, however briefly, of the 

 even greater advances made in others, in many cases through 

 the direct or indirect instrumentality of the Association itself, 

 acting in concert with the Royal and with the Royal Geographical 

 Societies. 



In topography the knoA'ledge obtained during this half 

 century has been unprecedently great. The veil has been with- 

 drawn from the sources of the Nile, and the lake systems of 

 Central Africa have been approximately localised and outlined. 

 Australia, never previously traversed, has been crossed and 

 recrossed in various directions. New Guinea has had its coasts 

 surveyed, and its previously utterly unknown interior has been 

 here and there visited. The topography of Western China and 

 Central Asia, which had been sealed books since the days of 

 Marco Polo, has been explored in many quarters. The eleva- 

 tions of the highest mountains of both hemispheres hive been 

 accurately determined, and themselves ascended to heights never 

 before attained ; and the upper regions of the air have been 

 ballooned to the e.xtreme limit beyond which the life-sustaining 

 organs of the human frame can no longer perform their func- 

 tions. In hydrography the depths of the great oceans have 

 been sounded, their shores mapped, and their physical and 

 natural history explored from the Equator to beyond both polar 

 circles. In the Arctic regions the highest hitherto attained 

 latitudes have been reached ; Greenland has been proved to be 

 an island ; and an archipelago has been discovered nearer to the 

 Pole than any other lanl. In the Antarctic regions a new con- 

 tinent has been added to our maps, crowned with one of the 

 loftiest known active volcanoes, and the Antarctic ocean has 

 been twice traversed to the 79th parallel. Nor have some of 

 the negative results of modern exploration been less important, 

 for the Mountains of the Moon and many lesser chains have 

 been expunged fro.n our maps, and there are no longer believers 

 in the inland sea of Australia or in the open ocean of the Arctic 

 pole. Of these and many others of the geographical discoveries 

 of the last half-century full accounts will be laid before you, 

 prepared for this section by able geographers ; of whom Mr. 

 Markham will contribute Arctic discovery ; Sir Richard Temple, 

 Asiatic; Lieut.-Col. Sir James Grant and Mr. H. Waller, 

 African ; Mr. Moseley, Australian ; Mr. Trelawny Saunders, 

 Syrian (including the Holy Land) ; the Hydrographer of the 

 Admiralty will undertake the great oceans, and Mr. F. Galton 

 will discuss the improvements effected in the instruments, 

 appliances, and methods of investigation employed in geo- 

 graphical researches. 



Of other branches of science which are auxiliary to scientific 

 geography, the majority will be treated of in the sections of the 

 Association to which they belong ; but tliere are a few which I 

 must not, in justice to the geographers who have so largely 

 contributed to their advance, leave unnoticed. 



Such is Terrestrial Magnetism," which had as its first investiga- 

 tors two of our earliest voyagers, the ill-fated Hudson and 

 Halley, who determined the magnetic dip in the north polar 

 and tropical regions respectively. Theirs were the precuisors of 

 a long series of scientific expeditions, during which the dipping 

 needle was carried almost from Pole to Pole, and which cul- 

 minated in the establishment, mainly under the auspices of this 

 Association, of the magnetic survey of Great Britain, of fixed 

 magnetic observatories in all quarters of the globe, and of the 

 Antarctic expedition of Sir James Ross, who, since the founda- 

 tion of the Association, planted the dipping needle over the 

 northern Magnetic Pole, and carried it within 200 miles of the 

 southern one. 



' Major-General Strachey, in a lecture delivered before the Royal Geo- 

 graphical ?}a€i<:\.y (Proceedings, vjl. xxxi. p. 179, 1877), discusses, with just 

 appreciation and admirable clearness, the interdependence of the sciences 

 which enter into the study and aims of scientific geography, and which he 

 enumerates under fourteen heads. This lecture contains the ablest review 

 of the subject known to me. It might very well be entitled "The whole 

 duty of the Geographer." Every traveller's outfit should include a copy of 

 it, and one should accompany every prize given by the Geographical Society 

 to students for proficiency in geographical kn:)wledge. 



^ The subject of an able lecture "On the Magnetism of the Earth," 

 delivered before the Royal Geographical Society by the Hydrographer of 

 the Admiralty (Proceedings, vol. x.xi. p. 20, 1876). 



Nor is the geography of this half century less indebted to 

 physicists, geologists, and naturalists. It is to a most learned 

 traveller, and naturalist. Von Baer, that the conception is due 

 that the westward deflection of all the South Russian rivers is 

 caused by the revolution of the globe on its axis.' It was a 

 geologist, Ramsay, who explained the formation of so many lake 

 beds in mountain regions by the gouging action of glaciers. It 

 was a physicist and mountaineer, Tyndal, who discovered those 

 properties of ice upon which the formation and movement of 

 glaciers depend. The greatest of naturalist-voyagers, Darwin, 

 within the same half-century has produced the true theory of 

 coral reefs and atolls, showed the relations between volcanic 

 islands and the rising and sinking of the bottonr of the ocean, 

 and proved that along a coast line of 2480 miles the southern 

 part of the continent of South America has been gradually ele- 

 vated from the sea level to 600 feet above it. Within almost 

 the same period Poulett Scrope and Lyell have revolutionised 

 the theory of the formation of volcanic mountains, showing that 

 these are not the long-taught upheavals of the crust of the earth, 

 but are heaped up deposits from volcanic vents, and they have 

 largely contributed to the abandonment of the venerable theory 

 that mountain chains are sudden up-thrusts. Within the same 

 period, the theory of the great oceans having occupied their pre- 

 sent positions on the globe from very early geological times was 

 first propounded by Dana,- the companion of Wilkes in his ex- 

 pedition round the world, and is supported by Darwin and by 

 Wallace. 



In Meteorology the advance is no less attributable to the labours 

 of voyagers and travellers. The establishment of the Meteoro- 

 logical Office is due to the energy and perseverance of a great 

 navigator, the late Admiral Fitzroy. 



Another domain of knowledge that claims the strongest sym- 

 pathies of the geographer is Anthropology. It is only within 

 the last quarter of a century that the study of man under his 

 physical aspect has been recognised as a distinct branch of science, 

 and represented by a flourishing society, and by annual inter- 

 national congresses. 



I must not conclude this notice without a passing tribute to a 

 department of geography that has occupied the attention of too 

 few of its cultivators. I mean that of literary research. Never- 

 theless, in this too the progress has been great ; and I need only 

 mention the publications of the Hakluyt Society, and two works 

 of prodigious learning and the greatest value, "The Book of 

 Marco Polo, the Venetian," ^ and " A History of Ancient Geo- 

 graphy, " * to prove to you that one need not to travel to new lands 

 to be a profound and sagacious geographer. 



I have asked you to accept the geographical distribution of 

 organic beings as the subject which I have chosen for this address. 

 It is the branch with which I am most familiar ; it illustrates 

 extremely well the interdependence of those sciences which the 

 geographer should study, and as I have before observed, its pro- 

 gress has been in the main due to the labours of voyagers and 

 travellers. 



In the science of distribution. Botany took the lead. Hum- 

 boldt, in one of his essays,^ says that the germ of it is to be found 

 in an idea of Tournefort, developed by Linnaeus. Tournefort 

 was a Frenchman of great learning, and, moreover, a great 

 traveller. He was sent by the King of France in 1700 to explore 

 the islands of Greece and mountains of Armenia, in the interests 

 of the Jardin des Plantes, and his published narrative is full of 

 valuable matter on the people, antiquities, and natural produc- 

 tions of the countries he visited. The idea attributed to him by 

 Humboldt,^ is that in ascending mountains we meet successively 

 with vegetations that represent those of successively higher lati- 

 tudes ; upon which Humboldt observes : " II ne fallut pas une 

 grande sagacite pour observer que sur les pentes des hautes 

 montagnes de 1' Armenie, des vegetans des differentes latitudes se 

 suivent comme les climats superposes I'un sur les autres" ; but 

 he goes on to remark, "cette idee de Tournefort developpee par 

 Linne dans deux dissertations interessantes (Stallones et Coloniaj 

 Plantarum), renferment cependant le genne de la Geographic 



• Von Baer " Ueber ein allgemeines Gesetz in der Gestaltung der Fluss- 

 betten," St. Petersh. Bull. Sc. ii. (i860). 



= Dana in American Journtilof Science, ser. 2, vol. m. p. 352 (1847). and 

 various later publications. 



3 By Colonel Henry Yule, C.B. (ed. i, 1871 ; ed. 2, 1875). 



•t By S. H. Bunbury(i879). .. . , r i™-„l»=" 



5 "Sur les lois que Ion observe dans le distribution des formes vigelales 

 (Memoire lu a I'lnstilut de France, January 29, 1816). . _„„„ ,„„,^ 



6 I have been unable to find any such idea expressed " 7°"™ 'ort s 

 works. Edward Forbes, however, also attributes the idea to lournetort 

 (Memoirs of the Geology Survey, vol i. p. 35i)> 



