Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/56

38 the coast of North America to the sixty-seventh parallel of north latitude; and Magellan's vessel the Vittoria, after sailing around the world, had returned in 1522 to San Lucar, in Spain, the port whence she set out.

The century that followed this period of discovery was occupied with the more particular exploration and settlement of the regions thus brought to the knowledge of mankind, and with the labors of geographers and cartographers in arranging the great mass of new materials into a reconstructed system of geography. With the exception of fruitless efforts to discover, in the interest of commerce, a northeast or a northwest passage to the Indies around the northern part of the globe, or directly across the pole, the zeal for geographical discovery abated through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the world being sufficiently occupied with what it had already acquired, either in building up great empires in the newly-discovered continents of North and South America, or by extending the rule of maritime nations over the coast of Africa, and the remoter parts of Asia, as in the settlement of the colonies established by the Portuguese, and by the British conquest of India. In fact, so large a portion of the earth's surface had become known within so short a period, that it presented enough to absorb all the activity of civilized nations for three centuries in the work of colonization, settlement, or conquest.

It was not until near the middle of the nineteenth century when this great work had produced its results in the establishment of such nations as the United States, Mexico, the republics of Central America, Brazil, the other states of South America, and of a vast dominion under British rule in India r and by the extension of Russia over a large part of Northern Asia, that the attention of mankind was again drawn to the yet undiscovered or imperfectly known portions of the earth, and a new interest awakened in geographical exploration and discovery. This may be said to have begun with the founding of a Geographical Society in Paris, in 1821; of another in Berlin, in 1828, and the establishment of the Royal Geographical Society of London, in 1830. These societies were formed to cultivate the science of geography in a more comprehensive spirit, to facilitate the acquisition of geographical information by the establishment of libraries, to disseminate it by publications, and to encourage and assist scientific travelers and explorers. Like all new things, however, it was some years before these societies produced any effect, or the world recognized the value of the purpose for which they were established; whereas the results which have since been brought about, chiefly through the instrumentality of such institutions, are beyond anything which the most sanguine of their projectors could have anticipated.

The Royal Geographical Society of London may be taken as an illustration of these societies. It has now 3,035 fellows, each paying