612 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 



and others have euabled us to lay down with something approaching: to accuracy 

 the archipelago of Franz- Josef Land. But perhaps the largest addition to our 

 information about the North Polar region during these twenty-five years has been 

 through the ever-memorable espedition of Dr. Nansen, during which he reached 

 within four degrees of the Pole, obtained soundings down to two thousand fathoms, 

 and collected a vast amount of meteorological, physical, and biological information, 

 which has enabled him to work out, to a large extent, the probable conditions which 

 prevail around the Pole itself. 



Let us pass now to the other end of the earth — to the great continent which, as 

 now appears beyond doubt, surrounds the Southern Pole. Here also very consider- 

 able progress has been made during the last twenty-five years. For a long period 

 after the time of Ross, over sixty years ago, only spasmodic eflfbrts bad been made 

 to continue the work of South Polar exploration. But in recent years numerous 

 national expeditions — Belgian, German, Swedish, and British — have pursued this 

 work, producing a mass of data in geology, physics, meteorology, and biology 

 which should throw a flood of light both on the present conditions and on the 

 history of this dead continent. Perhaps, as the successor in the Presidential Chair 

 of the Royal Geographical Society to that great geographer. Sir Clements Markham, 

 a Yorkshireman, I may be allowed to dwell specially on the splendid and varied 

 work of the National Antarctic Expedition under Captain Scott, which not only 

 carried our knowledge of the Antarctic continent about five degrees further south 

 than the limits of exploration previously reached, but also collected a vast amount 

 of scientific information. 



And now, leaving the Polar regions, let me try to recall the position of explo- 

 ration of the African continent in 1881. Stanley had only recently completed 

 that history-making journey across Africa, by which he traced on the map the last 

 great line in the framework of the continent, the river Congo ; and so accurate 

 were his observations that, notwithstanding the vast number of later explorers, 

 the course of the river laid down by him has practically remained unaltered. But 

 a glance at a map of Africa of 1881 reminds us that enormous blanks existed, 

 almost from the tropic of Capricorn to the upper bend of the Niger, in the centre 

 and west of the continent ; that the region between the equator and the Gulf of 

 Aden was almost unknown ; that our knowledge of the great lake region of Cen- 

 tral Africa, as also of the eastern and western tributaries of the Upper Nile, was 

 most imperfect. Little had been done for the Central Sudan States since the days 

 of Barth, and only very vague notions existed as to the real character of the 

 Sahara. Since 1881, through the efi"orts of Stanley himself and of a host of 

 Belgian, French, and British explorers, the map of the whole Congo Basin has been 

 crowded with rivers, defined with a fair approach to accuracy, while the hypo- 

 thetical lakes of the past have evaporated. In the southern quarter of the conti- 

 nent, all the region from the northern limit of Cape Colony up to the Congo 

 watershed and Lake Tanganyika has been to a large extent mapped in a pro- 

 visional way and all the main features laid down. The work of exploration in the 

 eastern regions of Africa has been no less complete. Stanley, on his expedition for 

 the relief of Emin Pasha, discovered the important range of Ruweuzori, and laid 

 down with some precision the outlines of Lake Albert Edward ; while British and 

 German explorers have made very fully known those remote feeders of the Nile 

 which supply the Victoria Nyanza, and have contributed largely to our knowledge 

 of the great Rift valleys and the lakes which occupy them. Joseph Thomson, the 

 original pioneer from the East Coast through Masailand towards Uganda, has been 

 followed by many others, so that the map of all this region is thickly studded with 

 new features ; while the Anglo-German Boundary Surveys have been able to 

 lay down a trigonometrical basis for a complete and trustworthy map of the whole 

 region. Somaliland, the outlying parts of Abyssinia, Lake Rudolf, the rivers that 

 run into it, and the rivers that run from the south-east into the Sobat and the 

 Nile — all these have been explored and laid down with wonderful fulness since the 

 Association last met in York ; while, after the breaking down of the barrier of 

 Mahdism, the advance in our knowledge of the Egyptian Sudan became almost 

 too rapid for record. IsTor has the progress of exploration in Western Africa been 



