364 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
Clb OGIEVAJe Isl Ve. 
ANNUAL ADDRESS BEFORE THE GEOGRAPHICAL SECTION OF 
THE BRITISH SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, AUG. 26, 1880. 
BY< GENIE.) J. io LERROWV,) EacR: iS: 
In other regions geography was the pioneer of civilization and commerce. 
Here for the first time she had been outstripped, for the telegraph and the rail- 
way had tracked the forest or prairie, and traversed the mountains by paths before 
unknown to her. Within living memory no traveler known to fame had crossed 
the American continent from east to west, except Alexander Mackenzie, in 1793- 
No traveler had reached the American Polar Sea by land except the same illustri- 
ous explorer and Samuel Hearne. ‘The British Admiralty had not long before in- 
structed Captain Vancouver to search on the coast of the Pacific for some near 
communication with a river flowing into or out of the Lake of the Woods. ‘The 
fabulous Straits of Annian were to be found on maps of the last century. ‘‘ The 
sacred fires of Montezuma” were still burning in secluded valleys of Upper Cali- 
fornia when Her Majesty ascended the throne. 
After referring to the memorable expeditions of Franklin and Richardson, 
of Back, and Simpson and Rae, he proceeded to point out the many agencies of 
work of late years to open up the continent; the military operations, for example 
of the United States Government against Mexico; the discovery of the precious 
metals; the explorations for the Union Pacific and Canada Pacific Railways ; in- 
ternational boundary surveys; the geological surveys of the American and Cana- 
dian Governments. These had all resulted in a surprising extension of geographi- 
cal knowledge without any of them having it particularly in view. It was a bold 
figure of speech of Lord Dufferin’s which described the Rocky Mountains in 1877 
as being nearly ‘‘as full of theodolites as they could hold,” but the Dominion 
Government had spent about three-quarters of a million sterling on explorations 
or surveys for their railway, and we had only to glance at a recent map to discov- 
er nine sovereign States and seven Territories west of the Mississippi, bounded 
by right lines, which neither war nor diplomacy had determined, laid out like 
garden-plots, to see that neither Asia nor Africa had unfolded more of their secrets 
in our times than had the nobler continent where Britain has cast her swarms. 
With reference to the survey operations of the Canadian Government in the 
North-West, where the problem presented was to prepare a vast territory, wholly 
wanting in conspicuous points, for being laid out in townships of uniform area, 
and farms of uniform acreage, he said that the law required that the eastern and 
western boundaries of every township be true astronomical meridians; and that 
the sphericity of the earth’s figure be duly allowed for, so that the northern bound- 
