664 REPORT— 1902. 



field of purely naval exploration we have not the same developments in mechani- 

 cal and instrumental accessories which place within our reach the possibility of 

 conducting land expeditions on far more scientific and exact methods than were 

 possible to our grandfathers. Wireless telegraphy, for instance, will not yet 

 enable a ship fast bound in Arctic ice to determine her longitude, and the restless 

 ocean still precludes the use of many of the more finely graduated instruments 

 which are essential to the exact measurements pertaining to triangulation. 

 Methods and instruments, indeed, will not diH'er materially from those adopted by 

 Franklin or by Ross more than half a century ago. Better instruments of their 

 class no doubt are within reach, owing to the extraordinary accuracy of modern 

 production ; but better hands to hold them it would be impossible to find. We 

 are often so pleased with ourselves in these days that we are apt to forget 

 what has been done by our geographical forerunners in the same field as our- 

 selves. I have but lately returned from a journey full of geographical interest 

 which has carried me over some of the tracks left many years ago by a British 

 scientific expedition to the South Seas, which will be ever associated in the 

 memory of all geographers with the names of Charles Darwin, and H.M.S. 'Beagle.' 

 With the wider scope for gathering information which is afforded in these days by 

 the growth of civilisation and the shooting out of its long tendi-ils into the waste 

 places of Patagonia, it has been possible to verify some of the suggestions as to 

 the structure and geographical configuration of that southern continent which 

 ■were ottered by the observations of Darwin, and to examine here and there, in 

 Bome detail, the results of recent local surveys in testing the accuracy of the 

 coast outline and of the coast soundings established by the ' Beagle.' Of the 

 former I can only say that they seem to me prophetic ; of the latter, so little 

 change has taken place in South American coast configuration during the last 

 fifty years that practically the charts of the ' Beagle ' are the charts of the Chilian 

 and Argentine Admiralties of to-day, with hardly a noticeable variation. Sucli 

 magnificent results as were achieved then are hard to beat at any time. We do 

 not hope to beat them. We can only hope to imitate them. They stand good 

 for all time, and it is useful to recall them now and then in order to emphasise a 

 truism which is occasionally overlooked by modern geographical explorers. It is 

 not the most recent work in the field of exploration which is necessarily the most 

 valuable. One of the great sins of omission in modern exploration is that of a 

 failure to appreciate the efforts of preceding geographers in the same field of 

 research as ourselves — the want of a patient absorption of all available previous 

 knowledge before we attempt to add to the sum of it. We are not all of us gifted 

 with the patient determination of that great traveller Sven Hedin, who spent 

 three years in reading about Central Asia before he wrote a word on the subject. 

 It cannot be too strongly urged in these days of narrowing fields for activity 

 that although geographical research is essentially an active function of an active 

 life it demands yet more and more, as time goes on, the application of the scholar 

 added to the determined energy of the explorer. 



Contraction 0/ the World's ' Terra Incognita.' 



It is, however, when we leave the high seas with their almost inexhaustible 

 store of unexplored ocean floors and icebound coast-line, and turn from oceano- 

 graphy to the more familiar aspects of land geography that we find those spaces 

 within which ' pioneer ' exploration can be usefully carried to be so rapidly con- 

 tracting year by year as to force upon our attention the necessity for adapting our 

 methods for a progressive system of world-wide map making, not only to the re- 

 quirements of abstract science, but to the utilitarian demands of commercial and 

 political enterprise. 



Asia. 



Take Asia, for example : nearly half of the great continent pertains to Siberia, 

 and within the limits of Russian territory the admirable organisation of her own 

 system of geographical exploration leaves no room for outsiders to assist usefully, 



