Charles Patrick Daly

“ In the department of physical geography, much interesting work has been done. Sir Wyville Thomson, as the result of observations made by him, chiefly in the scientific voyage of the Challenger, finds that many of the physical conditions of the globe depend upon its division into two hemispheres, one embracing nearly the whole of the dry land, and the other almost all the water. He says that all the vast mass of water, often two thousand fathoms in thickness, lying below what he calls the neutral land, moves slowly northward, and that this motion is due to the trade-winds. ”

“ To understand more clearly the rapid progress which was made in cartography in Europe in contrast with the little that was done for its improvement by the Arabs, it will be necessary to draw attention to the difference between the nature of the empire which they established and that era of maritime enterprise and commercial activity which sprang up, and after the twelfth century developed so rapidly in the cities of the Mediterranean. The Arabs had a vast empire, the great bulk of which had no connection with the sea. ”

“ William Thompson, the veteran American missionary and explorer in Syria, in a recent letter says that, in making a tour through this region, nothing ever impressed him so much as the richness of this field in the remains of ancient civilization. He says that there are not only acres on acres of splendid ruins, but fortifications, temples, baths, and theatres, the best preserved in existence, and which have evidently stood undisturbed for ages. ”

“ The Romans, in their representation of the earth, at first followed Eratosthenes and Hipparchus. The Emperor Augustus ordered the geographers and designers to prepare for the use of the people a map of the habitable world which should represent fully the extent of the Roman Empire; and, from some fragments that were preserved, it is known that this map was a cylindrical projection of a great circle. The Romans, however, had a map for practical use, which they styled a descriptive itinerary, or, as they sometimes called it, "painted roads." ”

“ It is supposed that this language was the source of what is known as the Cypriote syllabary, found in Cyprus, a system of characters of which each does not, like the letters of the alphabet, represent a single sound, but a syllable, and which was probably the language in use among commercial people throughout Asia Minor, until it was superseded by the simpler and more practical Phœnician alphabet. This discovery is exceedingly interesting, as the Hittites belong to the same race of people who perfected, by the alphabet, that greatest of human inventions, a written language. ”

“ Fra Carmelite was a friar who had established a geographical school in Venice, and whose acquisitions as a geographer were, for the time, so extensive that he received from his contemporaries the title of "the incomparable." He knew that the earth is a sphere—being well acquainted with Ptolemy, but did not follow Ptolemy's scientific method of so projecting the world as to give the longitude and latitude of places. ”

“ During the period that marks the rise, the maturity, and decline of the empire of the Arabs, or from the ninth to the thirteenth century, geography was assiduously cultivated by them as a science, especially in Bagdad, the capital of the Caliphs, and for a part of that period in Spain. It is to the Arabians that we owe the preservation of the work of Ptolemy, which they translated into Arabic and annotated. ”

“ He then ridicules the idea that the earth revolves in space without axis, or anything to support it, and characterizes the belief of antipodes, or people living on the other side of a round globe, as old men's tales. ”

“ In meteorology the most notable phenomena have been the very marked changes of the ordinary temperature in different parts of the world, particularly in western Europe, in certain parts of Asia, and in the eastern portion of the United States. It has been marked in Europe by winters of increased severity and an undue prevalence of moisture in the spring and summer, attended by very disastrous consequences to agriculture in Great Britain, France, and some other countries. The last winter on the European Continent, as well as in Great Britain, has been one of the severest upon record. ”

“ The great central sea of the inhabited region was the Mediterranean. The farthest point known at the west was the Straits of Gibraltar, then called the Pillars of Hercules. The southern part comprised the north of Africa as far as the deserts; while the region north embraced the countries bordering upon the Mediterranean, and an unknown hyperborean land farther to the north, with the Euxine and Caspian Seas at the northeast. The farthest eastern point known was about the western limit of India. This was what would then be contained in a map as a representation of the earth. ”

“ In 1511 Bernard Sylvanus produced in his edition of Ptolemy a general map of the world, upon what has since been called the cordiform or heart-shaped projection, which, while giving the whole of the geographical features of the earth, was, from the curve and sweep of the parallels of both latitude and longitude, better adapted than anything that had preceded it to convey upon a plane surface a general idea of the earth's globular form. ”

“ He states that fevers prevail all along the river-banks of the Zambesi, and in the lands adjoining the river, but that the country extending inland from the highlands of Benguela is the most suitable territory in all tropical Africa for colonization, being five thousand feet above the sea, fertile, well watered, and healthy. The people, he says, are docile, capable of improvement, are very fond of dress, and that a market would here be found for the consumption of foreign manufactures. ”

“ They found living in the sea, on the surface, or just below, a great quantity of beautiful organisms called Radiolarians. They increase with the depth, and many occur at great depths that are not found on the surface at all. The impression formed was that they lived all through the sea, and down to the greatest depths.
"The whole bottom of the Pacific, or the greater part of it, is red clay. The temperature of the ocean at 13,000 feet is very low. It is usually but a little above the freezing-point at the bottom of the Pacific and the Atlantic, and portions of the Southern Sea. ”

“ A highly imaginative people, they were more attracted by speculative inquiries respecting the earth as a whole, and therefore studied it more in its connection with astronomy than by those careful, patient, and practical topographical labors which constitute such an important part of geography. ”

“ Professor Mudge has gone into a calculation of the number of years to which the existence of man upon the globe may be traced, basing his calculation upon the rate at which the delta of the Mississippi is deposited. He reaches the conclusion that man has been on the earth not less than two hundred thousand years. ”

“ A way has been found from Zanzibar to the interior highlands which is free from the fever-swamps of the old route, and also from that great scourge of East Africa, the tsetse-fly, a fact of great importance in opening up Central Africa.
An Italian expedition started last February, for the exploration of the country on the east coast between Shoa and Lake Ukerewe. After many hardships, Liece, the capital of Shoa, has been reached, which will be made the base of a scientific exploration of the lakes. The expedition is to be absent four years. ”

“ Geological and geographical work in the United States has been pushed with vigor, and some interesting results developed. Mr. G. K. Gilbert has surveyed the Henry Mountains of southern Utah, discovered by Professor Powell ten years ago, and has reached the conclusion that the Saskatchewan River, which rises in the Rocky Mountains, was formerly the upper course of the Mississippi, and flowed to the Gulf of Mexico, until, by the rising of the land in Minnesota, a barrier was created which changed the course of the river, and by which Lake Winnipeg came into existence. ”

“ They were the great maritime nation of antiquity, making constant voyages along the coasts of the Mediterranean on either side, and along the western coast of Europe, as far as Great Britain, and possibly farther. The outlines of a coast once seen would, it is true, be sufficiently preserved in the memory for the practical purposes of navigation; but a people who had extended their voyages so far, who had established so many colonies, and to whom is attributed the invention of the alphabet, would naturally be led to the construction of charts ”

“ In the fifteenth century, great acquisitions were made to the knowledge of the world, especially in Asia and Africa, by the journeys of Marco Polo and Cadamosto; and the result of this accumulation of new information was the construction, in 1457, of a large map of the world, by Fra Mauro. ”

“ Arrangements have been made for a chain of stations to the extreme eastern end of the West Indies, all connected by telegraph with the Washington office. If Congress is wise enough to give sufficient appropriation to carry out these excellent plans, it will be impossible for any hurricane to enter the United States from the south unheralded, for hourly bulletins of its progress can be posted in every seaport. Who can estimate the lives and treasure that such an arrangement may save? Congress cannot be too generous to the Signal Service. ”

“ He states that he has seen girls with such a complexion that, if their features were European, they would pass in Europe for beauties. Lieutenant de Braza is of the opinion that this race of people came from North Africa, as he states that he has seen a race greatly resembling them, called the Ubamlo, south of the Congo. The men of this white African race, Major Pinto says, are remarkably muscular and robust, and that when they discharge an arrow at an elephant they bury the entire shaft in the animal's body. They live by themselves, subsisting on roots or the spoils of the chase ”

“ The lowest part of the desert is 200 feet below the sea, and it was found that an area of 1,600 square miles could be flooded; but constantly-shifting sands would make it a continual expense, and the evaporation from the surface of such a lake would exceed the water flowing in the Colorado in a dry season. Thirteen atlas sheets of Lieutenant Wheeler's survey have been issued; they are upon a scale of eight miles to the inch, and cover a large part of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. ”

“ The Continent of America, North and South, is represented as running northwesterly to the center of the map, and as extending from 70° north latitude to 40° south latitude, the shape of the continent as then understood being evidently derived from a chart, not then published, which, from an inscription upon it, is supposed either to have been drawn by Columbus, or under his direction. ”

“ While on the west side of the Jordan, he remarks, cities have been robbed to build other cities—just as the ruins of Tyre are now contributing ship-loads of stone toward building the present city of Beyrout—the east side of the Jordan has remained unmolested for 1,500 years; and that there exists there an unequaled combination of art and Nature in an untouched condition of splendor and ruin. ”

“ We have now in this discovery of Mr. Smith the memorials of a lost people, in neighboring proximity to the Phœnicians; a people who had an important part in the early progress of ancient civilization, with respect to which an eminent Egyptian scholar expresses his conviction that future discoveries in the course of this exploration will afford convincing proofs that this civilization, which was of the highest antiquity, was of an importance which we can only guess at. ”

“ His further conclusion is that the Chaldeans and Babylonians, as indicated by their early languages, the Accadian and Medic, were of a Tartar or Turanian family, and may possibly have belonged to the yellow races of China, while the Assyrians were of the white race; and he thinks that the conclusion of many naturalists is correct that the geographical center from which man emanated and spread over the globe was in the tropical regions of the Old World. ”

“ He claims that the Shemitic roots are universally Aryan, and that the stems of all the varieties of the early Aryan tongues are found in their purest condition in the languages of the Indians of Peru and Bolivia, especially in the Quichua and the Aimara; and he maintains that the high plains of Bolivia and Peru are the central point from which the human race dispersed, which accords with the view expressed by some American archaeologists that America is not only geologically but ethnologically the Old World. ”

“ He says, in speaking of those affluents, "I use the words small rivers, but the smallest in Africa are almost always enormous ones." He found the river Cuqueima, to his surprise, running to the north, which was contrary to its position on the maps, and flowing from the north to the southwest, toward the Quango, of which it is an affluent. ”

“ The Coast Survey continues its work: in the Gulf of Mexico careful soundings have been made, and observations on the temperature of the water and the flow of currents, which will throw light on the Gulf Stream. Triangulations were pushed eastward from the Pacific Coast Range to the Sierra Nevada, some of the triangles observed having sides over 150 miles long; a series of telegraphic determinations of longitude have been made for the purpose of correcting our charts of the West India Islands, one point at least having been located on each island. ”