488 The National Geographic Magazine 



been missed in the course of them, and 

 loss of ships and life on these unknown 

 dangers still continues. With the in- 

 crease of shipping, increased number of 

 ships of heavy draft, the closeness of 

 navigation due to steam, and the desire 

 to make quick passages, smaller inac- 

 curacies of the charts become yearly of 

 greater importance. 



As an illustration of the condition of 

 affairs, I may mention that in Hamoaze, 

 the inner harbor of Plymouth, one of 

 the headquarters of the British fleet 

 for more than 300 years, a small but 

 dangerous pinnacle of rock was only dis- 

 covered five years ago, while numerous 

 other dangers of a similar character have 

 been yearly revealed in close surveys of 

 other harbors in the United Kingdom 

 supposed to be well examined and 

 charted in the last century. 



There never was a greater need for 

 close marine surveys of places frequented 

 by ships than now. 



THE EARLIEST MAPS 



It is interesting to look back and see 

 the gradual progress of the delineation 

 of the world and to mark how very 

 recent any approach to accuracy is. 



The very earliest maps of any extent 

 of country are unfortunately lost to us. 

 The first man who made a map of which 

 any historical record exists is Anaxi- 

 mander of Miletus, about 600 B. C, but 

 we know nothing of it. A map is men- 

 tioned by Herodotus as having been 

 taken in 500 B. C. by Aristagoras of 

 Miletus in the shape of an engraved 

 bronze plate whereon the whole circuit 

 of the earth was engraved, with all its 

 seas and rivers, to influence Cleomenes, 

 King of Sparta, to aid the Ionians 

 against Persia. This was probably the 

 work of Hecataeus, to whom early geog- 

 raphy owed much. His works are also 

 only known to us by quotation ; but 

 they are especially interesting as con- 

 taining an early idea of the limits of 

 Africa, which he represents as entirely 



surrounded by the sea — a circumstance 

 apparently either forgotten or disbe- 

 lieved in later years. 



Erotosthenes, 250 B. C, and Hip- 

 parchus, 150 B. C, made great advances, 

 and the former made the first attempt to 

 measure the size of the earth by the dif- 

 ference of latitudes between Assouan 

 and Alexandria in Egypt, an attempt 

 which, considering the great imperfec- 

 tion of his means, was remarkably suc- 

 cessful, as, assuming that we are right 

 in the length of the stadium he used, 

 he made the circumference of the globe 

 25,000 geographical miles, whereas it 

 should be 21,600. 



He also devised the system of merid- 

 ians and parallels as we now have them ; 

 but the terms "latitude" and "longi- 

 tude," to denote positions on those cir- 

 cles, were introduced by Ptolemy. 



The maps of Ptolemy, the great Alex- 

 andrian astronomer and geographer of 

 A. D. 150, are the earliest we possess. 

 He drew, besides a general map of the 

 whole known world from the southern 

 part of the Baltic to the Gulf of Guinea, 

 north and south, and from the Canary 

 Islands to the China Sea, east and west, 

 a series of twenty-six maps of the dif- 

 ferent parts. 



Ptolemy's maps and his method of rep- 

 resenting the spherical globe on a flat 

 surface had a great influence on geog- 

 raphy for many years. After his time 

 the Greek civilization waned, and the 

 general decline of the Roman Empire, 

 followed by its disruption by the inva- 

 sion of barbarians, closed the course of 

 discovery in all branches of research for 

 centuries. It is not too much to say 

 that for 1 300 years no advance was made, 

 and until the commencement of explo- 

 ration by sea, which accompanied the 

 general revival of learning in the fif- 

 teenth century, Ptolemy's maps repre- 

 sented the knowledge of the world 



As might be expected, the further he 

 got from the Mediterranean, the greater 

 were his errors ; and his representations 



