TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 739 



The middle of the 18th century marks an important epoch in the history of 

 geography. In ancient times Ptolemy and Strabo grasped the system and 

 possibilities of our science, but they failed to build high from lack of a broad 

 foundation of precisely recorded facts. Subsequently, geography had its Dark 

 Ages and its Renascence in harmony with the general trend of human affairs. By 

 the end of the 16th century Mercator and Ortelius had somewhat more than 

 recovered the Greek position, but still, for another century and a half, geographers 

 wrestled with essentially the same problems as had presented themselves to the 

 ancients. The observers ascertained latitudes and longitudes with ever-increasing 

 precision, the cartographers projected the observed positions on their maps with, 

 growing happiness of compromise, and the scholars sought, with the prodigious 

 industry characteristic of the age, to identify the sites mentioned by the ancient 

 authorities. Three names — Harrison, D'Anville, and Vareuiiis — in the several 

 fields of observation, cartography, and scholarship, may be taken as completing 

 this stage of development, although, as is always the case, the new and the old 

 overlapped. In 1761 the chronometer was added by Harrison to the magnetic 

 compass, the log-line, the sextant, and the theodolite, and thus was completed the 

 observer's equipment. In the same year D'Anville published his Atlas Modernp, 

 in which (besides a fidelity of outline greater than that of his predecessors Delisle 

 and Homann) he brought to bear a mechanical tinish and a criticism of data that 

 were new to cartography. Only a few years earlier, in 1755, there appeared in 

 Paris a French translation of the Geographia Generalis of Varenius, first published 

 at Amsterdam in 1650, edited for Cambridge in 1681 by Sir Isaac Newton, and 

 reprinted again and again for three generations as the masterpiece of the ' scholarly ' 

 geographers. Thus when George III. was still young, the Jwrizojital outlines of 

 the map of the world had taken their now familiar form, and school geography 

 consisted of ' the use of the globes ' with some small attention to classical topo- 

 graphy. 



What made the 18th century a transition age of such importance to geography 

 was the realisation of new problems, which both Antiquity and the Renascence had 

 either neglected or utterly failed to solve. These problems allow of most general 

 expression by the use of three convenient terms, two of them lately imported from 

 Germany — lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere — the first implying the rock 

 globe whose surface is both land and sea-bed, the other two denoting the external 

 envelopes. The geographer is concerned with the atmosphere, the hydrosphere 

 and the surface of the lithospbere. His first business is to define the form, or relief, 

 of the surface of the solid sphere, and the movements, or circulation, within the two 

 fuid spheres. The land-relief conditions the circulation, and this in turn gradually 

 changes the land-relief. The circulation modifies climates, and these, together 

 with the relief, constitute the environments of plants, animals, and men, Shorn of 

 complexities, this is the main line of the geographical argument. In the language 

 of Richthofen, the earth's surface and man are the terminal links. It is clear 

 that all depends on the accuracy of the first premises — the form of the lithosphere 

 and the movements within the hydrosphere and atmosphere. Before last century 

 geographers ascertained the horizontal elements in form, but neglected the vertical. 

 In the matter of outline, the maps of D'Anville are an immense improvement on 

 those of Ortelius, but they exhibit essentially the same almost child-like methods for 

 the depiction of relief which had been employed by Buckinck in the 1478 edition 

 of Ptolemy. Until this was remedied the whole superstructure of comparative 

 and philosophical geography lacked any real basis. 



Like the letters of the alphabet, conventional hill-shading was evolved from 

 pictures rather than invented. The great atlas of Germany, published at Nurem- 

 berg in 1753 by the successors of Homann, consisting as it does of maps engraved 

 in various years extending from 1718 to 1753, shows admirably almost every stage 

 in the evolution. Other striking evidence may be seen in the chart of New 

 Zealand drawn from Captain Cook's surveys, and reproduced by Admiral Wharton 

 in his edition of Cook's Journal. Side by side on the same chart, we have 

 the ' ant-hills' of Buckinck and Ortelius, and the ' caterpillars ' of modern maps; but 

 the latter, like degenerate animals with rudimentary organs, still retain clear marks 



3B2 



