TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 163 



fill this chair. Deeply do I regi-et not to he ahle to speak of him from personal 

 acquaintance, or even from correspondence. I knew him only hy his works. And 

 who is there that did not ? The long list of those works has been rehearsed in so 

 many of the notices that have honoured his memory, as well as in the address of 

 the Vice-President of the Geographical Society, when presenting the medal which 

 he had won hy so many years of faithful labour in the cause of Geography, that I 

 need not now repeat them. Indeed, when contemplating the catalogue of such an 

 amount of work achieved, an amateur geographer like myself stands abashed — but 

 feels at the same time that his own limited experience and desultory studies serve 

 at least to furnish him with some just scale by which to estimate the vast labours 

 involved in the accomplishment of such a life's work as Dr. Keith Johnston's. 

 During tliat life's work of five-and-forty years, there was little or no call for mo- 

 difications in the assigned dimensions or outline of the inhabited continents of the 

 world, such as were needed in the con-esponding space of years that followed the 

 first voyages of Columbus and Da Gama. But with the exception of that epoch, 

 none in history has produced so much change in the atlas of the world, by the 

 modification and completion of internal spaces that once stood in error or in blank 

 upon our maps. Think of the growth of knowledge of which we should become 

 sensible were we to compare sheet by sheet this late geographer's first National 

 Atlas with the latest editions of the maps of his Royal Atlas! Think of the 

 changes that we should find in the representation of Central America and Interior 

 Afiica, in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, in Australia, in Central and Northern 

 Asia, in Indo-Chiua — nay, to some extent in India itself! I will conclude these 

 remarks by quoting the words used by a friend in writing to me on this subject: 

 — " I obtained, at various times, from Keith Johnston, information, which he was 

 always most ready to give ; and I had an opportunity of learning something of the 

 wide range of his researches and correspondence, and of his diligence in the pur- 

 suit of materials for his work. He seemed to be imbued with the modesty and 

 caution of a true student of a science which is so constantly presenting corrected 

 views of old knowledge, as well as new facts and new means of investigation ; 

 whilst he showed the real delight he had in the labours themselves, no less than in 

 the attainment of the results." 



I shall in this Address attempt no general view of the geogi'aphical desiderata 

 of the time, and of recent geographical progi-ess in discovery and literature through- 

 out the world. Living habitually far from new books and meetings of societies, I 

 am not sufficient for these things ; nor, if I were, could I easily vary from the com- 

 prehensive epitome of the year's geogi-aphy which, but two months ago, was 

 issued, though, as we know with sorrow, not delivered, by him who has been so 

 long the Dean of the Faculty of Geographers in Britain, and whose name is as 

 thoroughly and as respectfully identified throughout the Continent with English 

 geography as once was that of Palmerston with English policy. And since I am 

 naming Sir Roderick Murchison, all, I am sure, will be glad to know that, though 

 his power of bodily movement is seriously impaired, his general health is fair, his 

 intellect and his interest in knowledge are as bright as ever ; and as for his me- 

 mory, I wiU only say I wish mine were half as good ! He has desired me to take 

 occasion to express his deep regi-et at his inability to be present at this Meeting. 

 It is, he said, one of the most painfully felt disappointments that his illness has 

 occasioned ; for he had looked forward with strong interest to taking part once 

 more in a meeting of the Association at the chief city of his native countrj' — with 

 which city, I may remind you, he the other day bound his name and memory by 

 strong and endm'ing ties, in the foundation of a Chair of Geology in this Univer- 



Instead, then, of attempting a review which in my case would be crude, and 

 therefore both dull and unmstructive, I propose to turn to one particular region of 

 the Old World with which my own studies have sometimes been concerned, and to 

 say something of its characteristics, and of the progress of knowledge, as well as 

 of present questions regarding it. 



There are, however, one or two points on which I must first touch lightly. Of 

 Livingstone, all that there is to tell has already been told to the world by Sir Ro- 

 derick Murchison. We know the task that Livingstone had laid out for himself 



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