greater rivers of the world, and their access to them; while their political and intellectual character, and even their moral and religious habits, are affected by the extent of their migrations, the intercourse they maintain with their parent tribes and with each other, and the climate in which they finally settle. When history becomes more important, the name and description of each groupe of human abodes are still more interesting.

As the circle of civilisation spreads and enlarges, the knowledge of distant regions becomes at once more exact and more widely diffused. Whether we trace its enlargement on a greater or less scale, as conducted by the emigration or extended dominion of the more enlightened tribes, or as connected with the enterprise and restlessness of individuals, man appears designed to multiply his accommodations by exchanging the varied advantages and productions of every part of the earth and he either becomes, with his extended knowledge of them, more contented with his existing allotment on its surface, or stimulated to seek out for himself a better.

If even we contemplate the march of conquest, and the actual foundation which it has supplied of the existing political arrangements of the world, geographical information will be often found to have invited the successful expedition -always to have attended it. Ignorance, in fact, of the horrors of a northern winter, will appear to have providentially hastened the downfal of a modern Alexander; while Alexander of Macedon will be seen to have added greatly to our knowledge of the earth, by including some of the ablest of ancient geographers in his suite; charged with the duty of making observations on both the coasts and the interior of the provinces through which he passed. In their journals, it is well known, we find to this day some of the oldest and most important land-marks between the real and fabulous geography of Asia.

We propose to call the attention of our readers in this article to I. A History of the Progress of Geographical Discovery from the earliest periods. II. The Physical and Political Geography of the Globe. III. A Sketch of Technical or Artificial Geography.

This will be found conveniently divided into the History of Ancient and Modern Geography; that is, the progress of this science as known to the ancient world, or until the period of the first Portuguese voyages; and its important and rapid advances since that period. The geography of the middle ages has no distinctive characters that require in this place particular consideration

SECT. I.-OF ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY. Some portions of geographical knowledge are found amongst the most uncivilised tribes; but it is local, and confined to their own immediate haunts, or wild and visionary, associated with innumerable superstitions. The geography of the most ancient nations was long and necessarily of the

former character: it was limited by the sphere of their own wants and their own experience. As mankind settled themselves in permanent abodes they had more time to become speculative about distant regions; as they spread themselves on the surface of the earth they acquired a real knowledge of its productions and peculiarities. It is easy to perceive how rapidly this kind of knowledge would thus be generated amongst men, considered as a whole, and that it would of necessity, as amongst the most useful, be found amongst the earliest of their acquirements: but mankind never long remained as a whole; there were the same means of geographical as of many other kinds of knowledge in the ancient, as in the modern world, but the difficulties of communicating and therefore of perfecting it were great, and the methods of perpetuating it few and very partially cultivated.

The antediluvian geography is altogether a matter of sacred history; for, while all nations retain traditions of the flood and its consequences, in the writings of Moses only have we any consistent account of either: to the few traces, therefore, of this the 'earliest dawn' of the science, preserved in those writings, we may at once refer the reader. It chiefly involves two or three curious questions of biblical criticism, such as the locality of Eden, the site of Ararat, &c.

Both before and after the flood the longevity of man was favorable to the diffusion and transmission of this and every other kind of knowledge; but the dispersion of mankind, according to the most approved construction of Gen. xi., would more than counterbalance this: they were now compulsorily the dependent and pilgrim beings they were so unwilling to acknowledge themselves; and, thinly peopling large districts, would soon lose the remembrance of a common origin. It is worthy of remark, however, that near the plains of Shinar, where Moses fixes the scene of their early attempt to settle themselves, and the point of their dispersion, the two earliest empires, Assyria and Babylon, were established; and a more central spot, from which all the countries first inhabited could be reached (including even China) cannot be found upon the earth.

The Egyptians are the earliest settled people of whose internal polity we have any account. Some writers have supposed that Misraim, which Moses informs us was its ancient name, is a word of dual termination, derived from Maser, a fortress; and consider it to designate the two Egypts, Upper and Lower. This is conjectural enough; but in the time of Abraham, 1920 years before the Christian era and above 1000 prior to the birth of Herodotus the father of Grecian history, we learn from the pentateuch that Egypt was a monarchy, under a king of the name of Pharaoh; under tillage, perhaps, or a corn country, and therefore a resort in famine and after the lapse of about 200 years we find it under the same form of government, rich and well cultivated; possessing an established priesthood, whatever were their pretensions, who had a considerable landed property; and that the rest of

the lands were held in fee simple, as we should say, by the private occupiers. It had also a class of men styled in our translation 'physicians.' Its monarch was surrounded by a court and appointed officers. We read also of his chariots; and of waggons, vestures of fine linen, rings, gold chains, silver cups, and other traces of civilisation and opulence among the people.

The Phoenicians, less favored in regard to the soil of their country, are the first people of whose maritime expeditions we have any consistent account; their situation on the shores of the Mediterranean familiarised them to the sea; and so early as 600 years after the deluge, the navigation and commerce of Sidon (one of their cities) had acquired a celebrity that the patriarch Jacob mentions at the moment of his death, Gen. xlix. 13. At a later period these merchants founded colonies in Africa, Spain, and other countries of the Mediterranean; and even extended their navigation beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the ocean. It seems also certain that they navigated the Indian seas; for the ships of Hiram are said to have brought gold to Solomon from Ophir, which is generally thought to have been situated on the western side of that peninsula. They seem, indeed, to have been the early carriers of all civilised nations, and to have been as careful to conceal their discoveries as possible, that they might retain this monopoly.

We now come to the earliest traces of geographical knowledge among the Greeks. Homer, in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, describes the shield of Achilles as representing the cosmography of the age, and on it the earth is figured as surrounded by the sea, or rather by a large river, the sources of which Hesiod afterwards placed near the pillars of Hercules. The disk included the Mediterranean much contracted on the west, the Ægean and part of the Euxine seas, so that Greece is the centre of Homer's world. On the west, the geography of the poet did not extend beyond the kingdom of Ulysses, comprehending the isles of Same, Zacynthus, and some others, with a part of the neighbouring continent: beyond this his knowledge was vague and confined, and the strait which separates Sicily from Italy may be considered as the vestibule of his fabulous world; where the floating rocks, the howling of the monster Scylla, and the terrific Charybdis, all demonstrate that we are in the regions of romance.

him in like manner gradually immerging into the regions of fable. After passing through the Hellespont, &c., into the Euxine, he mentions the Halizones, a people possibly inhabiting the banks of the Halys, beyond whom are the Amazons, a nation of female warriors, to whose country succeeds the kingdom of Colchis, near the circumference of the disk, on which the poet places the palace of the sun, and the theatre of the amours of Apollo, with a daughter of the

ocean.

The geography of Homer to the south-east is more rational: we find him acquainted with the whole west coast of Asia Minor; and not entirely ignorant of the country of the Phoenicians, whose purple stuffs, gold and silver works, naval science, avidity, and cunning, afford him the subjects of several strains; nor of Egypt, whose river he knew by the name of Egyptos, and of whose inhabitants he praises the medical skill. Between Egypt and the Pillars of Hercules the distance is much shortened, and is occupied by a country named Lybia, where, says the poet, the lambs are born with horns, and the sheep bring forth three times a-year.'

Above the earth, according to Homer, was a solid vault or firmament, under which the sun and moon performed their daily journeys in chariots rolling on the clouds. In the morning the luminary of day arose from the bosom of the eastern ocean, and in the evening sunk in the western; a golden vessel, the workmanship of Vulcan, during the night, transported him back by the north to the east. Beneath the earth the poet also placed a vault, named Tartarus corresponding with the firmament, where, in eternal night, dwelt the Titans, the enemies of the gods. Hesiod even determines the height of the firmament, and the depth of the gulf of darkness; an anvil, says he, would be nine days falling from the heavens to the earth, and as many descending from the earth to the bottom of Tartarus.

On the west, Homer's world was terminated by two fabulous countries. Near the sources of the ocean, and not far from the dismal caves of the dead, were the Cimmerians, an unhappy people, immersed in eternal darkness; beyond them in the ocean, and, consequently, according to the poet, beyond the limits of the earth and the empire of the winds and seasons, is Elysium; where neither tempests nor winter are ever felt, where the soft zephyr continually murmurs, and where the elect of Jupiter, snatched from the common lot of mortals, enjoy eternal felicity. Beyond this happy region, the earth was enveloped by an indefinite chaos; a confused mixture of existence and nothing; a gulf, where all the elements of heaven and Tartarus, of the earth and the ocean, were confounded; a gulf, dreaded by the gods themselves.'

sighted people though with but one eye; and the Griphons or guardians of the precious metals in the Riphæan mountains. As the geography of the west was extended, all these marvellous people were transferred onwards; the Cimmerians to Asia Minor and Germany, where two people were found with names somewhat similar, inhabiting the shores of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, and the Cimbrick Chersonesus. The Hyperboreans, another fabulous people of the Greeks, were successively transferred to an island which corresponds with Great Britain, and to the northern extremities of the earth, where they were made to inhabit a very agreeable country, explained by the days and nights being each six months long, or by the momentary proximity of the sun, when, according to the ideas of Homer, he passes during the night by the northern ocean to return to his palace in

the east.

In the age of Homer indeed the Greeks were so little skilled in navigation, that the most trifling voyage was considered an heroic enterprise. Thus Menelaus employed eight years in visiting the Isle of Cyprus, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Lybia; and none but pirates ventured, he tells us, at the risk of their lives, to steer direct from Crete to Lybia.

The ancient and famous voyage of the Argonauts is founded on the Homeric cosmography. Jason and his companions, according to Hesiod, passing from the Mediterranean by the Euxine and Phasis into the Eastern Ocean, were prevented from returning by the same route, in consequence of the fleet of Colchis blockading the Bosphorus, and were obliged to make the circuit of the coast of the Ethiopians, and to cross Lybia by land, drawing their vessels with them. After a journey of four days, in this manner, they arrived at the gulf of Syrtis in the Mediterranean. Other ancient writers conduct the Argonauts back by the Nile, which they supposed to communicate with the Eastern Ocean, while later ones endeavour to reconcile the ancient tradition with the discoveries of their own times, and make them take a route by the Palus Mæotis and Tanais into the northern ocean, and round the supposed northern limits of the earth, by the west to the Strait of Hercules, by which they again enter the Mediterranean. Finally, when the non-existence of the communication between the Palus Mæotis and the northern ocean was proved, the Argonauts were supposed to have ascended the Danube; a branch of which was thought to empty itself into the Adriatic.

These vague geographical traditions were gradually, however, exploded by the foreign wars of the Greeks, and by the growing spirit of ambition, which obliged or induced a portion of them to seek new countries, and new sources of riches and power. The Milesians and Megarians formed commercial establishments on the Euxine. The Corinthians colonised Sicily, while the Phocæans, flying from oppression, settled in Sardinia, in Corsica, and in Gaul, where they founded Marseilles. Coleus, a Samian, driven out of his course by a tempest, passed the Strait of Hercules, and navigated the

Atlantic. After visiting Tartessus, the Peru of these ages (probably a portion of the South of Spain), he returned to Greece with such riches as awakened the enterprise of other adventurers The Phoenicians in vain attempted to check th navigation of the Greeks; the latter, on the contrary, appear to have procured some of the charts of that people, and Anaximander, a Milesian, first published a map of the world. He, however, compared the earth to a cylinder, Leucippus to a drum, Heraclitus to a boat, while others gave it a cubic form, and Xenophon and Anaximenes are said to have thought it a vast mountain whose base extended to infinity, and which the heavenly bodies illuminated by revolving round it.

Herodotus now, however, challenges the praise of narrating only what he saw himself or learned from ocular witnesses. He visited in the course of his long voyages and journeys the Greek colonies of the Euxine from the Bosphorus to the Phasis, but he adheres to the Homeric system in many respects. He describes the world as divided into three parts; but Europe separated, according to him, from Asia, by the rivers Phasis and Araxes and by the Caspian Sea, he supposes larger than Asia and Lybia taken together. He believes that a fleet sent by Darius circumnavigated Asia from the Indus to the confines of Egypt, while, with regard to Africa, he was unacquainted with any point between Carthage and the Pillars of Hercules. On the east coast, he was well acquainted with the shores of the Arabian Gulf, but makes this continent terminate considerably north of the equator. He has also preserved to us the traditionary relation of a voyage of the Phoenicians round Africa. With respect to the North of Europe, he knew that the Phoenican colony of Gadez received tin and amber from these regions, but could not fix the position of the Cassiterides, whence came the first of these objects, and was yet more ignorant of the country where they obtained the second.

A voyage of Hanno, prince of the Carthaginians, the descendants of the Phoenicians, was performed about the time of Herodotus. He sailed from Carthage to found colonies on the coast of Lybia, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, with a fleet of sixty vessels, each rowed by fifty oars, and escorting a convoy with 30,000 persons of both sexes. Some geographers limit the extent of Hanno's navigation on the coast of Africa to Cape Nun, others extend it to Cape Three points on the coast of Guinea. Major Rennell terminates it near Sierra Leone.

Hamilcar, in the same century, after a voyage of four months to the North, arrived at the isles Oystrymnides, probably Scilly, and on the coast of Albion. It seems also probable, that the Carthaginians had even before this discovered the Canaries. Aristotle speaks of an island, the beauty of which had drawn to it in his time such numbers of the Carthaginians, that the senate forbade any further emigration thither, on pain of death; and Diodorus mentions a sitnilar discovery of them.

These ideas of a fertile distant island of the ocean, Plato found circulating in Egypt, and,

clothing them in his own poetic language, creates his celebrated Atlantic Island, 'the most beautiful and fertile country of the universe, producing abundance of corn and fruits of the most exquisite flavor; containing immense forests, vast pastures, mines of various metals, hot and mineral springs, in short, every thing necessary to the wants or pleasures of life. Its political government was admirable, being governed by ten sovereigns, all descended from Neptune, and who, though independent of each. other, all lived in harmony; its commerce was flourishing, and it contained several large cities with a great number of towns and rich and populous villages. Its ports were crowded with foreign vessels, and its arsenals filled with materials for the construction and equipment of fleets. Neptune, who was the father, legislator, and god of the Atlantides, had here a temple a stade in length, covered with silver and ivory, and which contained a golden statue of the god, the height of the temple. The descendants of Neptune reigned over the island 9000 years, and extended their conquests over all Lybia to Egypt, and over Europe to Tyrrhenia, their incursions even extending to Greece, but here they were repelled by the Athenians. At length this warlike nation, after having rendered its name celebrated throughout the world, suddenly disappeared, an inundation, caused by an earthquake, submerging the whole island in a night and a day.'

About the time of the Peloponnesian war, Scylax collected the itineraries of the navigators of his time, and what has been preserved of the collection contains the coasts of the Palus Mæotis, the Euxine, the Archipelago, the Adriatic, and all the Mediterranean, with the west coast of Africa as far as the isle of Cerné of Hanno, or Fedalle, according to Gosselin. Beyond this, says the Greek, the sea is not navigable on account of the thick herbs with which it is covered.

Half a century after, Eudoxus of Cnide first applied geographical observations to astronomy; and Aristotle inferred about the same time the sphericity of the earth from the observations of travellers, that the stars seen in Greece were not visible in Cyprus or Egypt. The same philosopher supposed the coasts of Spain not very distant from those of India; and describes the habitable earth as a great oval island surrounded by the ocean, terminated on the west by the river Tartessus, (probably the Guadalquivir), on the east by the Indus, and on the north by Albion

and Ierne.

Nearly in the century after Aristotle (B. C. 344) the voyage of Pytheas took place, respect ing which great diversity of opinion exists amongst geographers. He is said to have departed from Marseilles, coasted Spain, France, and the east side of Britain, to its northern extremity; whence, still continuing his course to the north, after six days' navigation he arrived at a land called Thule, the situation of which is a great object of discussion: the most probable conjecture is that it is a part of the coast of Jutland.

We have intimated how important was the

expedition of Alexander to the progress of this science. As well as the direct services performed by his suite, we owe to him our knowledge of the books previously buried in the archives of Babylon and Tyre, which were now by his order transferred to the city to which he gave his name; and thus the astronomical and hydrographical observations of the Phonicians and Chaldeans became accessible to the Greeks.

Commercial enterprise soon after stimulated the Greeks to further exertion: the Marsellais, endeavouring to follow the route of Pytheas, visited the north; and Euthymenes, in a voyage along the west coast of Africa, arrived at a large river, probably the Senegal, which he described as similar to the Nile. At about the same period the Greek kings of Egypt caused a trade to be opened with India from the ports of Berenice and Myoshormos on the Red Sea; and Ptolemy Philadelphus sent geographers into Asia. the same reign Timosthenes published a description of the known sea-ports, and a work on the measure of the earth. The navigation of the Indian seas, however, was at this time very imperfect; the Greek fleets continuing to creep along the shores as far as the Indus, but having their chief intercourse with the coasts of Ethiopia and Arabia Felix: the monsoons appear indeed to have been entirely unknown to them.

In

Hipparchus, it would seem, had some notions of India beyond the Ganges. He attempted to reduce geography to astronomical and mathematical bases; but, having few celestial observations, his map of the world is filled with erroneous hypotheses. He was the first who conceived the notion of a southern continent uniting Africa and India. Eudoxus of Cyzicus first suggested the possibility of sailing round Africa by the south. Strabo relates, after Possidonius, the grounds on which that navigator made this conjecture, and the voyage in which he found the prow of a ship, which came from the west, in returning towards the Arabian Gulf from India. But he never seems himself to have completed a voyage in that direction.

Polybius was the first Roman writer whose contributions to geographical science are of any importance. He himself examined the coast of Africa as far as Mount Atlas, and first ventured to think that the torrid zone might be habitable.

Strabo, at the commencement of the Christian era, formed a complete system of geography. He first describes Iberia (Spain), with the coasts of which he seems pretty well acquainted. Near them he places the Cassiterides or Isles of Tin, which according to one part of his writings, are north of the port of Artabres (Corunna), according to another parallel with Britain. For all the geographers of this period made Britain a triangular island, of which the southern point was but little distant from the northern coast of Spain. The Cassiterides were therefore evidently the Scilly Islands, long the Carthaginian point of refreshment in their visits to Britain for tin.

Straho was not so well acquainted with the coast of Graul, and still less with Albion and

Terne; the latter he says is reported to be altogether sterile and inhabited only by Anthropophagi. This is the last country of his geography towards the north, and, as he disbelieved the voyage of Pytheas, the continent of Europe terminated with him at the Elbe.

This writer was also but imperfectly acquainted with the north coast of Africa; for he makes the distance between Sicily and the pillars of Hercules only 13,000 stades. On the west coast his map is limited to about Cape Roxo, for he seems to have been unacquainted with Hanno's voyage, and on the east coast his knowledge did not extend, it would seem, beyond Cape Bandellans, his Noti Cornu or southern Horn. Thus the coasts of Africa were unknown beyond the latitude of 12° N. Strabo places at the southwest extremity the Ethiopes Etherii, and at the south-east the region of Cinnamon. Between these extremes he admits but a small space, which the great heat had prevented being visited, and this extremity of Africa he supposed to be washed by the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, which here met: an opinion which maintained its ground against the idea of India and Africa being united, until the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope. Eastward the details of Strabo's geography seem only to have included the mouth of the Indus; though he had some conjectural knowledge of Taprobana (Ceylon), derived from the Greek expeditions to this neighbourhood.

It is only in the later years of the Roman republic that we find any accurate description of the Canaries amongst that people. This was given by Statius Sebosus; who collected at Gadez all the particulars which Sestorius and others who had previously fled from Rome thither had transmitted into Spain; and they now received the name of the Fortunate Islands.

In the first century of the Christian era appeared the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a work which marks distinctly the progress of discovery at this time on the coasts of Africa and India. The Noti Cornu of Strabo, no longer bounded the voyages undertaken along the eastern shores of the former continent, but they were extended to the port of Rapta and the isle of Menutias, corresponding with Bandel Velho and the island of Magadoxca. Beyond Rapta however, says the writer, the ocean is entirely unknown, but is believed to continue its western direction, and after having washed the south coast of Ethiopia to join the western ocean.' The Periplus gives a description of the west coast of India from the Indus to Ceylon, and mentions a part of the coast between Bombay and Goa as infested with pirates. The east coast of the Indian Peninsula is less accurately traced. India beyond the Ganges was known to the author of the Periplus only by report. This work however mentions the monsoon of these seas.

Great Britain seems to have been first ascertained to have been an island by the Roman fleet sailing round its north extremity, in the reign of Vespasian. Ireland also became at this period better known from the intercourse of the Impe

rial armies with the Britons. The Roman armies in the same century are thought to have reached the shores of the Baltic through Ger

many: they named this the Sarmatic Sea. The Cimbric Chersonesus of Ptolemy is evidently the Danish peninsula; the Codanus Sirius of Pliny, the Cattegat; and the isles of Scandiæ, east of the Chersonesus, the larger Danish isles and perhaps the coast of Schonen. The Nerigon of Pliny is probably a part of the southern coast of Norway.

Pliny, indeed, considers the Ganges as the north-eastern limit of Asia, from which he supposed the coasts to turn to the north and to be washed by the sea of Serica, between which and the pretended strait communicating from the Caspian Sea to the Scythian or Northern Ocean he admits but a small space: hence he supposes it possible, that some Indians might have been driven in a storm from their own coasts to those of Germany. In the system of Pliny, it therefore follows, that the ocean occupies the vast spaces of Siberia, Mogul, Tartary, China, &c.

Ptolemy's knowledge of the east coast of Africa was bounded on the south by the promontory of Pracum (Brava), and by the bay of Gonzales de Cintro on the west. He thought that to the south of this bay the coast of Africa, after first forming a gulf which he names Hespericus, extended indefinitely between the east and south to India. On the coast of that country beyond the Ganges he places a great gulf, now supposed to be the bight of Martaban, which on the east bounded the Golden Chersonesus; the Thinæ of this writer was the boundary of classical geography in this direction.

Two remarkable specimens remain of Roman itineraries. The first is that of Antoninus, containing merely, like our common road books, the names of the different places, and their distance from each other. The other, the Peutingerian Table, is of later origin, and professes to exhibit a map of the world. This is twenty one feet in length, and one foot broad. Every feature in fact, is increased immeasurably in one direction, and diminished as much in the other: the Mediterranean and Black Seas appear like rivers, rolling an amazing length; while the three continents are narrow strips of land through which they flow. In the longitudinal measures the space from Babylon to the Eastern Ocean occupies only one-eighth of the map, though it fills nearly half the space represented. In fact, the only object of this production appears to have been to exhibit the great roads leading from east to west through the Roman empire; and every other purpose of a map was sacrificed, if indeed at all contemplated, to this.

On the decline of the Roman empire, geography, with every other species of scientific knowledge, was committed, in the Christian nations, to the custody of monks and ecclesiastics. The only original work of cosmography that appeared between the second and sixth centuries, or rather the only one that has come down to us, is that of Cosmas, an Egyptian monk, who wrote about the latter period. He conceived of the earth as a vast square plain, surrounded by a wall which supported the vault of the firmament; and the succession of day and night as the effect of a great mountain placed to the north of the earth, behind which the sun conceals himself