Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/57

Rh £2 a year, a large permanent capital, and an annual income of $35,000. It has a building of its own, a fine library and map room, and is able to send, and has frequently sent out expeditions for geographical exploration and discovery, sometimes in coöperation with the government, and sometimes without it. Before, however, it reached this state it had, as I have been informed, to struggle for some years, as we have bad, to keep up its organization. The turning-point of its history, and in its influence, appears to have been the election, in 1843, of Sir Roderick I. Murchison to the presidency, then in the fullness of his fame as a geologist, but who thenceforth entered upon a new field, and one by which he was afterward chiefly known. In his first annual address, an elaborate and exhaustive production, he surveyed the then state of geographical research throughout the world, and pointed out with remarkable sagacity that the parts of the globe to which exploration and research should be directed and concentrated were central Africa, Australia, and the regions surrounding the north and south poles. Although his own fame had been made as a geologist, his course then and during the many years that he was the guiding spirit of the Royal Geographical Society showed very plainly his conviction that a thorough knowledge of the surface of our own planet, and of those physical laws that affect everything upon it, is practically of more importance to us than a knowledge of its past physical history or of other bodies in space.

It was not that he undervalued the sciences of geology and astronomy, which, in fact, form a part of the science of geography; but the earth is our own planet, the details of which are within our grasp, and there is therefore the greater reason why every effort should be directed to acquire a thorough knowledge of it, particularly as the increase of that knowledge requires widely-extended efforts over different parts of it, and a vast accumulation of details. I am not now expressing anything he may have said, but rather deducing my own conclusions of what he thought from what he did. He was evidently impressed with the conviction that sufficient attention was not then given to the advancement of the science of geography, and to his eminently practical mind it was clear that it was not to be advanced by simply studying it in the closet, but by explorations and scientific researches, requiring persistent efforts, continuous expenditures, and the labors of a numerous, zealous, and intelligent class of workers over a large part of the earth's surface. To accomplish this, the whole age had to be influenced, governments enlisted, and the different societies brought into active cooperation with each other, and it was to this work that Sir Roderick then set himself, and to which he may be said to have chiefly devoted the remainder of his life.

I have selected Sir Roderick Murchison rather as a type, for it was not to him alone, but to many other eminent men in France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and other countries, preëminent among whom