Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/58

40 was Alexander von Humboldt, that the conviction became general that the unknown, or imperfectly known, parts of the earth should be thoroughly investigated, and scientific researches actively prosecuted in respect to all phenomena coming under the general head of physical geography. This has, in fact, brought about, as I have said, a geographical age. There are now scattered over the globe thirty-four geographical societies, and, if we add other organizations devoted in part to geographical inquiry or labors, the number would be augmented to about fifty. Many of them are well endowed, large in point of numbers, and strengthened not only by the cooperation of, but by annual grants of money from, the governments of the countries in which they are situated.

How thoroughly this spirit was aroused, will appear by a brief, but necessarily imperfect, statement of what has been accomplished since this movement began.

When it commenced, the map of Africa was, with the exception of the northwestern projection, above the Gulf of Guinea, and the Nile region, almost a blank from the Mediterranean to the country in the vicinity of the Cape of Good Hope. Of the 17,000,000 of square miles in Asia, about 12,000,000 were either entirely unknown, or wholly cut off from all intercourse with mankind. The condition of Australia, with an area of 3,000,000 of square miles, is best expressed by quoting the language of a geographer of that day. "A corner of this huge mass of land," he says, "is all that is known." Twenty-five years ago the European population of Australia was estimated at about 50,000; it is now over 1,500,000, or thirty times as great.

The second island in point of size, and one of the most fruitful in the world, Papua, or New Guinea, is referred to by the same geographer Murray, as almost a terra incognita, having generally, he then said, "been viewed only by navigators from a distance;" and in respect to the next great island, Borneo, he puts the population of the colonies there under the Dutch at about 9,000. In 1870 the population of the Dutch colonies in Borneo was 189,253. The settled portion of the United States then embraced 800,000 square miles, beyond which was an area of 2,500,000 square miles inhabited by savages, and almost unknown; for we knew little of it then beyond what was known in the time of Jefferson, with the exception of Major Long's journey and Prof. Nicollet's exploration of the head-waters of the Mississippi.

This was the state of things at the beginning of the period referred to. I will now enumerate what has been done since, and especially within the last twenty-five years.

In Asia: the opening of the whole of China and Japan; the acquisition by the Russians of nearly the whole of Toorkistan, and the inauguration of a policy on their part which, either by treaty or military conquest, will throw open the whole of Northern Asia to the free