The Evening Star SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 1930. A GEOGRAPHICAL CENTENARY.

Evening Star, Issue 20434, 15 March 1930, Page 14

The Evening Star SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 1930. A GEOGRAPHICAL CENTENARY.

A centenary that has just befallen which deserves more than passing notice is that of the Royal Geographical Society. Late as its foundation was, only one hundred years ago, it had itt origin in very small beginnings. It sprang really out of the Raleigh Club, formed only a few years earlier to provide a meeting place in London foi returned travellers. This club used tc hold suppers at which food from fai lands was eaten, such as rye cake baked at the North Cape, bread made from the wheat of Heshbon, preserved globe berries from Lapland, and othei morsels which created “atmosphere” if they did not delight the palate. The Raleigh Club, from which the strength of the Royal Geographical Society war largely recruited in its early days, was merged in the younger body in 1854. The society which is honoured to-day was founded ■by seven men who met in a room at the Admiralty, and included Sir John Barrow, secretary ol that department, Sir Roderick Murchison, the great geologist, and Mi Mountstuart Elphinstone, who had been Governor of Bombay, and who, in later years, twice refused the GovernorGeneralship of India. Its object was tc remove the reproach that “ among the numerous literary and scientific societies established in our vast metropolis ” the importance of geography—- “ this most pleasing study ” —had been overlooked. It had been overlooked so entirely that accounts of the most famous voyages ever undertaken, written in English, had never beet published, a remissness which wai remedied some years later by the Hakluyt Society. The Geographical Society was to occupy itself mainly in the encouragement and assistance of exploration, and it has never ceased to work on those lines, organising or helping to finance expeditions, lending instruments, training surveyors, and assisting returned explorers to appraise and publish their discoveries. It wai Sir Roderick Murchison who, as its president, announced the plans for the Franklin expedition, and, when that failed to return and the Government refused to send a search party, despatched • M‘Clintock, whoso search established its fate. The assistance ol the society was given after that tc many famous expeditions, and, as a result of the example set by it, there are now nearly one hundred geographical societies scattered over the world, all with the same functions, which raaj be described as the advancing of geographical knowledge by encouraging and rewarding explorers and investigators, publishing the results of their work, and maintaining public interest in all that concerns geography. The object of the society is not yet exhausted. The most arresting discoveries of both the Byrd and the Wilkins expeditions to the Antarctic have been geographical. The additions that have been made to mankind’s knowledge of the earth in a hundred years may be seen most clearly by comparing a map of 1830 with one of to-day. On the old map Ptolemy’s “ Mountains of the Sun ” were still astride Africa, and, except in the south of that continent, just the mouths of the great rivers were marked. There were huge blanks also in Australia and New Zealand, in the East and even in India; in the Arctic only unconnected strips of the American continent were charted, and of the Antarctic little more than was discovered by Cook was known. To-day’s map has few vacant spaces. But it is not the view of the Geographical Society that the age of exploration has almost passed, and that the purpose of its existence will soon bo ended. Its official view is understood to be that so far as discovery is concerned probably that will be completed in another decade, but a great deal of exploration, particularly in Asia and Equatorial Africa, as well as on both the ice caps, remains to be done, and as for surveying there is very little of the world outside Western Europe that has yet been mapped in detail. Nor is it the view that the aeroplane will make the old ways of working out of date. It will supplement them, not supersede them. The configuration of the ground, the study of climate, and all the other branches if inquiry comprised in the vast field of geography can be tackled only from the ground. Instead of slackening (we are told) the society’s work will only take on a new orientation when discovery is exhausted. Between sixty and seventy per cent, of its interest has centred on discovery and exploration. In the future this percentage will tend to diminish, and the other branches of geography, of which the society’s founders, in their prospectors, named no fewer than twenty-two, will claim a greater share of attention.