672 REPORT — 1902k 



Use of the Telegraph in Geography. 



One of the chief means to this end is the telegraph. Few people appreciate the 

 important role which is played by the telegraph in these days in the field of 

 geography. It was not so very long ago that the first step towards regenerating 

 a natural'wilderness, or for securing access to new commercial openings or centres 

 of uncivilised population was held to be the construction of roads and railways. 

 Means of physical access was the first step towards the development of a country 

 which was regarded as unenlightened from thestandpoint of European civilisation. 

 It is so no longer, for the telegraph often threads its way through many a dreary 

 waste of unpeopled earth, uncoiling its length for hundreds of miles in advance of 

 any railway, or indeed of any road, which can in the ordinary sense of the term 

 be described as a constructed road. I will give you an illustration. On the 

 Patagonian pampas not so very long ago, in the midst of a wide wilderness of 

 snow, after losing our way in a blinding snowstorm and camping on our tracks 

 for the night, we struck the end of the telegraph line which is now being pushed 

 across Patagonia, and which will eventually connect the Atlantic with the Pacific. 

 "\Ve bad seen no roads whatever for a great part of the distance we had traversed. 

 Our daily procedure was the simple process of following a guide over the illimit- 

 able stretches of bush-covered uplands which reach down from the eastern foot of 

 the Andes in gentle grades to the Atlantic shore ; and when we did at last fall 

 in with the great central line of trans-continental communication we found it to 

 consist of the wheel-marks of certain previous waggons which had drifted along 

 that way, a sort of road which it was exceedingly easy to lose in the fading light 

 of a stormy winter's day. On this road there was nothing but a telegraph end 

 and the tents of a few telegraph officials, and we were some 150 miles from 

 our destination on the Atlantic coast. And so it happened that after weeks 

 of absence from any means of communication with the outside world we 

 were thus suddenly put in possession of its very latest news ; and the very first 

 messao-e that passed from the end of that line into my hands was the message 

 of neace with South Africa, signed an hour or two previously. I accepted 

 that message as a happy omen for the result of our Patagonian mission. And 

 thenceforward (thanks to the courtesy of the telegraph chief at Buenos Ayres) 

 niohtly as we sat in the snow we read all that was important from the London 

 evening papers of that self-same day. We were not starving by any means, but 

 Lad we wanted a loaf of bread in that unbroken stretch of snow-covered bushland 

 we certainly could not have got it ; whilst here was information flowing in with 

 a daily ease and regularity that I greatly missed when once again I was within 

 reach of clubs and civilisation. The importance of telegraphs in the field of 

 geo-^-raphy, however, is not confined to the transfer of news to casual travellers. 

 It is the "facility which it places in the hands of the geographer for determining 

 his position in longitude that renders it so important a factor in the prosecution 

 of a geographical survey. Everyone knows that the first duty of a geographer is 

 to discover his latitude and his longitude. Plitherto the determination of the 

 first has been a matter of no great uncertainty, but, as regards the latter, one can 

 only say that the confidence expressed by most explorers in the results of their 

 observations has never been justified by the final verdict of subsequent deter- 

 mination. It is, in truth, most difficult even for the most practised observer to 

 obtain an absolute value in longitude on which he can rely within such limits of 

 accuracy as are essential to the construction of a map where these values have to 

 be employed diflferentially. The telegraph places in our hands the means of 

 differential determinations within a degree of exactness that surpasses even that 

 of the most careful determination of latitude ; and the telegraph is every- 

 where. Supplementary to the facilities of time-signalling by telegraph is the 

 wonderful accuracy of graduation introduced into the smaller classes of new 

 instruments which in these days replace the cumbersome equipment of the 

 past. With a small 6-inch theodolite fitted with a complete vertical circle 

 time values can be determined within a fraction of a second, and latitude 

 values to within two seconds of arc, always provided that that great bugbear of 



