TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 153 



terms as illustrations of the important service which geographical science is 

 enabled to render to Nations and to States in the higher Held of political combi- 

 nations and diplomatic negotiations. It has been well said that the surveyor is 

 likely to do more in future than soldiers to prevent war ; and the more frequently 

 the scientific geographer precedes negotiations, the less ground there will be for 

 doubt or disputes about boundaries — a most fertile subject of quarrel in all ages. 

 Is it not quite certain, for instance, that if accurate and complete surveys had been 

 made of the Straits between Vancouver's Island and the American coast, and 

 appended to the treaty of 1846, which was intended to settle the Oregon boundary, 

 with a line drawn exactly where it was intended the delimitation should take place 

 by the two negotiators, no dispute could have arisen ? It may have seemed enough 

 to define the north-west water boundary to be " a line drawn from the middle of the 

 channel which separates the Continent from Vancouver's Island southerly through 

 the middle of the said Channel and of the Fuca Strait to the ocean," — more espe- 

 cially, perhaps, as the existence of the De Haro and Rosario channels, about which 

 the dispute has arisen, was known to the negotiators. Yet how long and fierce the 

 contention has been between two great powers ! and though now peacefully decided, 

 we all know that it has for more than 25 years been one of those qitestions which 

 might at any time have been a cause of war between two kindred nations, — the 

 greatest calamity that could well befall either the one or the other. 



The result of Sir Frederick Goldsmid's geographical labours in the east of Persia 

 during the past year has added another example of the inestimable political value 

 of accurate geographical surveys. In Asia more than any other country perhaps is 

 this necessity felt. Papers have been read at the Geographical Society describing 

 the journey of the Arbitration Commission from Bunder Abbas, through Kerman to 

 Seistan, and reporting fully on the districts which have been so long in dispute 

 between the Persian and Afghan governments. The line of delimitation between 

 the two coimtries has been decided by the labours of the Commission, and the last 

 mail from India announces its acceptance by both parties. My chief object in refer- 

 ring to it is to show the great and important services which not only may be, but 

 are actually rendered by geographical labours under able direction, and how much is 

 to be gained, both in the interests of peace and of science, from the adoption of a 

 practice of avoiding political complications by determining disputed lines of frontier 

 through the agency of mixed commissions and professional engineers. That it 

 should be generally adopted in the East must be the earnest desire alike of 



feographers and statesmen, and converts to the principle are rapidly increasing, 

 'he latest news from Constantinople brings the gratityiug intelligence that the 

 Sultan of Turkey and the Shah of Persia have mutually agreed to refer their 

 contentions about the boundaries between the two States to a mixed Commission 

 of this kind. The delimitation fixed by the British Government on the Upper 

 Oxus by similar action is a pledge of peace with Russia. These are so many 

 triumphs of an enlightened policy, by which disputed boundaries are settled, not by 

 the sword, but by geographical observation, the accuracy of which cannot be 

 contested. In this case it was rendered difficult, and all the more important 

 politically, because, as Colonel Yule has recently demonstrated, the whole geography 

 of the region of the Upper Oxus and surrounding country had been falsified 

 by Klaproth. In all the pseudo-travels that he invented he had imposed alike 

 upon the British and the Russian Governments ; and the consequences of such 

 falsification might have been most fatal, for it vitiated the maps of the Russian 

 Government, and with it their diplomacy. Fortimately our own information of 

 the geography of the trans-llimalayan regions had so much improved since Klap- 

 roth exercised his ingenuity, that it became possible not only to show where the 

 falsification existed, but how one great source of error had arisen. Colonel Yule 

 has proved, in a paper now published in the ' Transactions of the Geogi-aphical 

 Society,' how, by a certain square of the Chinese Map constructed in 1759 (which 

 was the groundwork of Klaproth's geographical knowledge) having been acci- 

 dentally turned round through an angle of 90", the mistake originated by which 

 the district of Wakhan for instance, instead of being laid down in the same parallel 

 as Badakhshan, was placed in the map (^100 miles to the northward, and thus 

 appeared to Prince Gortchalcoff to be conterminous with Kara-fef/iii. 

 1873. 11 



