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Whatever fancy may conceive, the severe compass of the geographer defines the circumference of Rome within a line of twelve miles and three hundred and forty-five paces; and that circumference, except in the Vatican, has invariably been the same from the triumph of Aurelian to the peaceful but obscure reign of the modern popes.
The trip decided the business of Darwin for the rest of his life, and thereby an epoch was worked in the upward and onward march of the race. Captain Fitz-Roy of the British Navy was but twenty-three years old. He was a draftsman, a geographer, a mathematician and a navigator. He had sailed around the world as a plain tar, and taken his kicks and cuffs with good grace.
Some decades later, about 1360, Fazio degli Uberti describes, in his rhyming geography, the wide panorama from the mountains of Auvergne, with the interest, it is true, of the geographer and antiquarian only, but still showing clearly that he himself had seen it.
When Dean Stanley visited America in the autumn of 1878, I met him several times, and he was especially cordial, and all the more so because of my out-spoken letter. The first time I met him was at the meeting of ministers of New York to give him a reception, and hear him deliver a discourse on Dr. Robinson, the Oriental geographer.
At last Paganel could contain himself no longer, and seizing Harry Grant's hand, he exclaimed: "Captain! will you tell me at last what really was in your indecipherable document?" A general curiosity was excited by this question of the geographer, for the enigma which had been for nine months a mystery was about to be explained.
BUACHE, the celebrated geographer, read some observations on the ancient map of the Romans, commonly called Peutinger's map, as well as on the geography of the anonymous writer of Ravenna. The sitting was terminated by an account of the life and works of Dumoustier, read by COLIN D'HARLEVILLE. The members of the Institute have a full-dress and a half-dress.
The marvellous conquering journey of Alexander had enormously widened the horizon of the Greek geographer, and stimulated the imagination of all ranks of the people, It was but natural, then, that geography and its parent science astronomy should occupy the attention of the best minds in this succeeding epoch.
Paganel shouted his loudest. No response came. "It is strange," repeated the geographer, going back to his cabin. "Close sympathy in thought and grief does not suffice to explain this phenomenon."
This praise must, however, be taken with great qualification; for even so late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, the distance from the South Foreland to the Lands-end was laid down, in all the maps of England, half a degree more than it actually is. We may here remark, that Nicholson represents Thomas Sulmo, a Guernsey man, who died in 1545, as our oldest general geographer.
To know and understand a living being, particularly when that living being happens to be his own Mother, man must use his heart as well as his head. With his head alone the geographer may do a vast amount of most useful and necessary work which will help us to understand the Earth.
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