Presidential a&dresS. 613 



less remarkable. Through the energy of the officials of the Chartered Royal 

 Niger Company, of Sir Frederick Lugard and his statl", of Biuger, Monteil, and a 

 host of other French as well as German explorers, great blanks have been filled in, 

 and mapping of the most detailed character in many districts has been rendered 

 possible. Our knowledge of Lake Chad and of its present and its probable past 

 has been greatly extended, and many problems have been suggested which will 

 provide ample work for the geographer and the geologist. The Sahara has been 

 crossed and recrossed in many directions during recent years, especially by Fi'ench 

 explorers, with the result that we have been compelled to revise the prevailing 

 impression of the great desert, which is by no means the featureless waste which 

 it used to be considered. Taking the continent of Africa as a whole, its map has 

 been thickly covered with a network of features, and, so far as cartography is con- 

 cerned, all that remains to be done is to fill in the meshes of that network with 

 local details and to give precision to our maps by careful triangulation. 



I have dealt at some length with exploratory work in Africa, because it is the 

 continent of which we knew least in 1881, and our knowledge of which has made 

 the greatest strides since then ; but the contemporaneous advance of our acquaint- 

 ance with the topographical and physical conditions of other portions of the 

 lithosphere has been very remarkable. A host of explorers, of whom I will only 

 mention Youngbusband, Littledale, Bower, Sven Hedin, and Huntington, have 

 crossed the centre of Asia in various directions. During the same period the 

 topographical survey of India has been brought to completion, while Indian 

 officers and others have carried geographical investigations far beyond the limits 

 of our great Dependency, and have made much progress in the mapping of 

 Baluchistan and Persia. The recent Tibet expedition practically settled the 

 question of the sources of the Brahmaputra, and laid down its central and upper 

 course. I do not know whether we should regrer that they were not able to fill 

 in the long gap in the lower course of that river, for we still enjoy the pleasures 

 of hope of solving this interesting problem, which, with some equally unsolved 

 problems in other parts of the globe, reminds us that explorers need not yet sigh, 

 like Alexander, for other worlds to conquer. Numerous travellers have crossed 

 China in ail directions, and have done much for its accurate mapping, as have 

 also the French in their Indo-Chinese possessions. Even in Turkey in Asia, 

 where serious difficulties are encountered by explorers, such men as Ramsay and 

 Maunsell have done much valuable work. 



Turning to America, the very efficient surveys of Canada and of the United 

 States have made an immense advance in the accurate mapping of their respective 

 countries, while much has also been done in Mexico and in Central America. The 

 Argentine Republic and Chile have made great progress in the exploration and 

 mapping of their territories, and Peru and Bolivia have within recent years shown 

 creditable diligence in this respect ; but there remain in the southern continent 

 areas covering from two to three million square miles still practically unexplored, 

 so that to-day, as far as preliminary exploration is concerned, there is more to be 

 done in South America than in Africa. 



I have, perhaps, sufficiently indicated the marvellous progress of exploration of 

 the lithosphere. I have naturally less to say of the advance of oceanography, 

 for the ' Challenger ' expedition had completed its voyages before the Jubilee meet- 

 ing of the Association in 1881, although the results were not then worked out. 

 It is, indeed, only within the last few years that Sir John Murray has been able 

 to complete this immense work, which occupies no less than fifty volumes. Since 

 the voyages of the ' Challenger ' there has been no equally extensive expedition 

 for oceanographic work, but the study of the oceans has been carried on steadily, 

 if slowly. The German expedition in the ' Valdivia ' added much to what the 

 'Challenger' had achieved, especially in the Indian Ocean; where also, only 

 within the last year, Mr. Stanley Gardiner has carried out an enterprise which 

 promises to yield results of the first importance. Further east, in the seas around 

 the Malay Archipelago, the Dutch 'Siboga' expedition added something to our 

 knowledge of the ocean bed ; and not less important than any of these later expe- 

 ditions was the enterprise carried out over a series of years in the Pacific and in 



