224 



A GRIEVANCE. 



phy in the Lake B;egions were of no importance, 

 because tlie latitudes and longitudes, not the 

 descriptions of the country, were the work of 

 another hand. A bad attack of ophthalmia in 

 Sind, and a due regard for eyes which have to 

 do the work of four average pair, made me re- 

 solve, in 1849, never to use sextant or circle 

 except when there is an absolute necessity. A 

 President of the E^oyal Geographical Society 

 wrote that I had done nothing for geography in 

 South America, after having, in one of my half-a- 

 dozen journeys, through the almost unexplored 

 Sierra de San Luiz in the Argentine Hepublic, 

 inspected and described 1300 miles of a river cer- 

 tainly unknown to him 10 years ago. This meagre 

 idea of geography, reducing a journey to a skeleton 

 of perfectly uninteresting ' crucial stations,' care- 

 fully laid down by lunars, occultations, and other 

 observations, and fitted only for the humblest pro- 

 fessional map-maker, seems to have taken root 

 in the Uoyal Geographical Society's brain, since 

 the days when that learned body was presided 

 over by Admiral Smyth. Volney never handkd 

 sextant ; yet see what Gibbon says of his labours. 

 "We may now hope to see all such things changed. 



These African explorations are campaigns 

 on a small scale, wherein the traveller, unaided 



