thinking of. It is only quite recently that men have sought
for knowledge about lands, apart from the men who inhabit them.
One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery,
properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose
voyages was purely scientific curiosity. But before his time men
wanted to know one another for two chief reasons: they wanted to
conquer, or they wanted to trade; or perhaps we could reduce the
motives to one--they wanted to conquer, because they wanted to
trade. In our own day we have seen a remarkable mixture of all three
motives, resulting in the European partition of Africa--perhaps the
most remarkable event of the latter end of the nineteenth century.
Speke and Burton, Livingstone and Stanley, investigated the interior
from love of adventure and of knowledge; then came the great chartered
trading companies; and, finally, the governments to which these
belong have assumed responsibility for the territories thus made
known to the civilised world. Within forty years the map of Africa,
which was practically a blank in the interior, and, as will be
shown, was better known in 1680 than in 1850, has been filled up
almost completely by researches due to motives of conquest, of
trade, or of scientific curiosity.

In its earlier stages, then, the history of geographical discovery
is mainly a history of conquest, and what we shall have to do will
be to give a short history of the ancient world, from the point
of view of how that world became known. "Became known to whom?"
you may ask; and we must determine that question first. We might,
of course, take the earliest geographical work known to us--the
tenth chapter of Genesis--and work out how the rest of the world
became known to the Israelites when they became part of the Roman
Empire; but in history all roads lead to Rome or away from it,
and it is more useful for every purpose to take Rome as our
centre-point. Yet Rome only came in as the heir of earlier empires
that spread the knowledge of the earth and man by conquest long
before Rome was of importance; and even when the Romans were the
masters of all this vast inheritance, they had not themselves the
ability to record the geographical knowledge thus acquired, and it
is to a Greek named Ptolemy, a professor of the great university
of Alexandria, to whom we owe our knowledge of how much the ancient
world knew of the earth. It will be convenient to determine this
first,