Geography (Gr. gê, 'the earth;' graphein, 'to describe') etymologically means a description of the earth. The term as now accepted by its most competent students is applied to that department of science whose function it is to investigate the features of the earth's surface, and the distribution and mutual topographical relations of all which that surface sustains. It thus involves a study of the atmosphere or air-covering; the geosphere or land-surface; and the hydrosphere or water-covering. The basis of geography is topography, including topographical relations and distribution. But to understand this thoroughly a certain elementary knowledge of various departments of science is necessary; and this knowledge is often included in what is somewhat vaguely known as Physiography (q.v.). To understand what may be regarded as the subject proper of geography—viz. the features of the earth's surface, their distribution and relations, and the distribution and relations of the denizens of the surface—some knowledge is required of the relations of the earth to the sun and the other members of the solar system, and of the celestial sphere generally. For exact topographical observation (see SURVEYING) a precise knowledge of certain astronomical data is required. This department is treated in the ordinary text-books under the heading of Astronomical or Mathematical Geography. An elementary acquaintance is also advisable with certain physical and chemical facts and laws, in order to understand the action of the atmosphere, of wind, rain, ice, and water (rivers, lakes, the ocean), and those other factors which help to constitute climate, and which do so much to shape those features with which geography has chiefly to deal. Equally useful is a general knowledge of the character of the great classes of rocks which compose the surface, and of the leading families of plants and animals which cover it, especially those of economical importance. This, though strictly preliminary, is often included along with a study of the features themselves, in Physical Geography. The investigation of the ocean and its denizens has recently been made a new department under the title of Oceanography or Thalassography. Again, to an account of the different states or communities into which man is divided the term Political Geography is commonly applied.
Commercial Geography discusses the various countries and regions of the earth with special reference to their products and their requirements as affecting trade and commerce; and Medical Geography deals with localities as liable to become the seats of special diseases or groups of diseases.
Of course any section of geography may be treated and studied by itself, just as in the case of geology, or chemistry, or physics. But for purposes of research, for practical results, and even for educational uses, it is now considered more satisfactory to treat geography as one whole, dealing with the characteristics, distribution, and mutual relations of the great features of the earth's surface, the great classes of plants and animals which cover that surface, and of man himself. Such a study, it is maintained, is not only an excellent discipline, but the knowledge of facts and laws so obtained can be applied in many useful practical directions. Most of all it may be applied to the distribution of man in communities or states, and so, combined with other considerations, lead to a rational study of political geography and the course of history. In the same way the knowledge may be applied in the interests of industry, of commerce, of colonisation, and in many other economical directions. Geography, when thus treated, is, it is maintained, both more interesting and more profitable than when dealt with as a mere collection of unconnected facts and factors. It has long been so treated in Germany by such geographers as Ritter and Peschel, and their followers, and similar views are rapidly prevailing in England and America. In Germany the subject is often divided into general physical and political, and special physical and political geography, the latter, of course, dealing with particular countries or regions. Of course, like all other departments of learning, the subject may be broken up into sections, and dealt with for teaching purposes, and in a more or less elementary manner. For the most elementary stage, it is now generally considered advisable to begin with the immediate topographical surroundings of the pupil and proceed outwards. It should be stated that the eminent German geographer, Professor G. Gerland, maintains that geography has to do with the earth as a whole, and that the human side of it, or anthropogeography, belongs exclusively to history.
Special aspects of geography will be found treated under ANTHROPOLOGY, ASTRONOMY, CLIMATE, CLOUDS, EARTH, ETHNOLOGY, GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION, GEOLOGY, GLOBE, HEAT, LAKES, LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE, MOUNTAINS, RAIN, RIVERS, SEA, WINDS, &c. As authorities to consult on the various aspects of geography referred to, may be mentioned Ritter's Erdkunde; Mrs Somerville's Physical Geography (latest edition); Peschel's Physische Erdkunde, Abhandlungen zur Erd- und Völkerkunde, and Neue Probleme der Vergleichenden Erdkunde; Suess, Das Antlitz der Erde; Ratzel, Anthropogeographie; Unser Wissen von der Erde; I. Allgemeine Erdkunde; Himman's Eclectic Physical Geography; the volume of 'Education Reports' issued by the Royal Geographical Society, and the Lectures contained therein; General R. Strachey, Lectures in Geography; 'The Scope and Methods of Geography,' by H. J. Mackinder in Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc. (vol. ix.); 'Scientific Earth-knowledge as an Aid to Commerce,' by H. R. Mill in Scot. Geog. Mag. (vol. v. p. 302); 'Applied Geography,' by J. S. Keltie in Contemp. Rev. (Sept. 1888); Chisholm's Handbook of Commercial Geography (1889).
The facts of Political Geography will be found under the headings of the different continents, countries, and towns in this Encyclopædia. As authoritative works on the subject (both general and political) may be mentioned Reclus, Géographie universelle (with its English translation); and Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel.
For the purposes of geographical discovery, or the geographical knowledge of various parts of the earth, reference must be made to the articles on continents and oceans, and also to the articles on CHARTS and MAPS. Here only general reference can be made to the progress of correct notions of the earth and, in connection therewith, of a general knowledge of the extent and form of the earth's surface. As the earliest efforts, within the historical period, to extend a knowledge of the earth's surface began with the Mediterranean nations of antiquity, it is natural and right to start there, although in one sense exploration is coeval with humanity.
The earliest definite idea formed of the earth by nations emerging from a primeval condition seems to have been that of a flat circular disc, surrounded on all sides by water, and covered by the heavens as with a canopy, in the centre of which their own land was supposed to be situated. The Phœnicians were the first people who communicated to other nations a knowledge of distant lands; and, although little is known as to the exact period and extent of their various discoveries, they had, before the age of Homer, navigated all parts of the Euxine, and penetrated beyond the limits of the Mediterranean into the Western Ocean; and they thus form the first link of the great chain of discovery which, 2500 years after their foundation of the cities of Tartessus and Utica, was carried by Columbus to the remote shores of America. Besides various settlements nearer home, these bold adventurers had founded colonies in Asia Minor about 1200 B.C.; a century later they laid the foundation of Gades, Utica, and several other cities, which was followed in the course of the 9th century by that of Carthage, from whence new streams of colonisation continued for several centuries to flow to parts of the world hitherto unknown. The Phœnicians, although less highly gifted than the Egyptians, rank next to them in regard to the influence which they exerted on the progress of human thought and civilisation. Their knowledge of mechanics, their early use of weights and measures, and, what was of still greater importance, their employment of an alphabetical form of writing facilitated and confirmed commercial intercourse among their own numerous colonies, and formed a bond of union which speedily embraced all the civilised nations of Semitic and Hellenic origin. So rapid was the advance of geographical knowledge between the age of the Homeric poems (which may be regarded as representing the ideas entertained at the commencement of the 9th century B.C.) and the time of Hesiod (800 B.C.) that, while in the former the earth is supposed to resemble a flat circular shield, surrounded by a rim of water spoken of as the parent of all other streams, and the names of Asia and Europe are applied only, the former to the upper valley of the Cayster, and the latter to Greece north of Peloponnesus, Hesiod mentions parts of Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and Spain, and is acquainted with the Scythians and with the Ethiopians of southern Africa. During the 7th century B.C. certain Phœnicians, under the patronage of Neku or Necho II., king of Egypt, undertook a voyage of discovery, and are reported to have circumnavigated Africa. This expedition is recorded by Herodotus, who relates that it entered the Southern Ocean by way of the Red Sea, and after three years' absence returned to Egypt by the Pillars of Hercules. The fact of an actual circumnavigation of the African continent has been doubted, but the most convincing proof of its probability is afforded by the observation which seemed incredible to Herodotus—viz. 'that the mariners who sailed round Libya (from east to west) had the sun on their right hand.' The 7th and 6th centuries B.C. were memorable for the great advance made in regard to the knowledge of the form and extent of the earth. Thales, and his pupil Anaximander, reputed to have been the first to draw maps, exploded many errors, and paved the way by their observations for the attainment of a sounder knowledge. The logographers contributed at this period to the same end by the descriptions which they gave of various parts of the earth; of these perhaps the most interesting to us is the narrative of the Carthaginian Himilco, who discovered the British Islands, including the Cestrymnides, which he described as being a four months' voyage from Tartessus.
With Herodotus of Halicarnassus (born 484 B.C.), who may be regarded as the father of geography as well as of history, a new era began in regard to geographical knowledge. Although his chief object was to record the struggles of the Greeks and Persians, he has so minutely described the countries which he visited in his extensive travels (which covered an area of more than 31° or 1700 miles from east to west, and 24° or 1660 miles from north to south) that his History gives us a complete representation of all that was known of the earth's surface in his age. This knowledge was extremely scanty. It was believed that the world was bounded to the south by the Red Sea or Indian Ocean, and to the west by the Atlantic, while its eastern boundaries, although admitted to be undefined, were conjectured to be nearly identical with the limits of the Persian empire, and its northern termination somewhere in the region of the amber-lands of the Baltic, which had been visited by Phœnician mariners, and with which the people of Massilia (the modern Marseilles) kept up constant intercourse by way of Gaul and Germany. In the next century the achievements of Alexander the Great tended materially to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge, for while he carried his arms to the banks of the Indus and Oxus, and extended his conquests to northern and eastern Asia, he at the same time promoted science, by sending expeditions to explore and survey the various provinces which he subdued, and to make collections of all that was curious in regard to the organic and inorganic products of the newly-visited districts; and hence the victories of the Macedonian conqueror formed a new era in physical inquiry generally, as well as in geographical discovery specially.
While Alexander was opening the East to the knowledge of western nations, Pytheas, an adventurous navigator of Massilia, conducted an expedition past Spain and Gaul, through the Channel, and round the east of England into the Northern Ocean. There, after six days' sailing, he, according to some, reached Thule (conjectured to be Iceland, although the actual locality is very uncertain), but according to the most competent interpreters of the story only heard of it. Returning, he passed into the Baltic, where he heard of the Tentones and Goths. Discovery was thus being extended both in the north and east into regions whose very existence had never been suspected, or which had hitherto been regarded as mere chaotic wastes. An important advance in geography was made by Eratosthenes (born 276 B.C.), who first used parallels of longitude and latitude, and constructed maps on mathematical principles. His work on geography is lost, yet we learn from Strabo that he considered the world to be a sphere revolving with its surrounding atmosphere on one and the same axis, and having one centre; although the belief in the spherical form of the earth was at the time confined to the learned few. He believed that only about one-eighth of the earth's surface was inhabited, while the extreme points of his habitable world were Thule in the north, China in the east, the Cinnamon Coast of Africa in the south, and the Prom. Sacrum (Cape St Vincent) in the west. During the interval between the ages of Eratosthenes and Strabo (born 66 B.C.) many voluminous works on geography were compiled, which have been either wholly lost to us, or only very partially preserved in the records of later writers. Strabo's great work on geography, which is said to have been composed when he was eighty years of age, has been considered as a model of what such works should be in regard to the methods of treating the subject; but, while his descriptions of all the places he has himself visited are interesting and instructive, he seems unduly to have discarded the authority of preceding writers.
The wars and conquests of the Romans had a most important bearing upon geography, since the practical genius of the Roman people led them to the study of the material resources of every province and state brought under their sway; and the greatest service was done to geographical knowledge by the survey of the empire, which was begun by Julius Cæsar, and completed by Augustus. This work comprised a description and measurement of every province by the most celebrated geometricians of the day. Pliny (born 23 A.D.), who had travelled in Spain, Gaul, Germany, and Africa, has left us a compendium of the geographical and physical science of his age in the four books of his Historia Naturalis which he devotes to the subject. He collected with indefatigable industry the information contained in the works of Sallust, Cæsar, and others, to which he added the results of his own observations, without, however, discriminating between fact and fiction. The progress that had been made since Cæsar's time in geographical knowledge is evinced by Pliny's notice of arctic regions and of the Scandinavian lands, and the accounts which he gives of Mount Atlas, the course of the Niger, and of various settlements in different parts of Africa; while his knowledge of Asia is more correct than that of any of his predecessors, for he correctly affirms that Ceylon is an island, and not the commencement of a new continent, as had been generally supposed.
The study of geography in ancient times may be said to have terminated with C. Ptolemy, who flourished in the middle of the 2d century of our era. His work on Geography, in eight books, which continued to be regarded as the most perfect system of the science through the dark and middle ages down to the 16th century, gives a tolerably correct account of the well-known countries of the world, and of the Mediterranean, Euxine, and Caspian, together with the rivers which fall into those seas; but it added little to the knowledge of the north of Europe, or the extreme boundaries of Asia or Africa. Yet, from his time till the 14th century, when the records of the travels of the Venetian Marco Polo opened new fields of inquiry, the statements of Ptolemy were never questioned, and even during the 15th century it was only among a few German scholars at Nuremberg that the strange accounts given of distant eastern lands by the Venetian traveller were received as trustworthy where he differed from Ptolemy. Marco Polo had, however, unfortunately made no astronomical observations, nor had he even recorded the length of the day at any place, and hence the Nuremberg geographers, who had no certain data for estimating the extent of the countries which he had traversed, were the means of propagating errors which led to results that were destined to influence the history of mankind. For, taking Ptolemy's tables as their basis, they incorporated on their globes and maps the results of their own rough estimates of the length of Marco Polo's days' journeys, and they thus represented the continent of Asia as extending across the Pacific, and having its eastern shores somewhere in the region of the Antilles. These erroneous calculations misled Christopher Columbus to the false assumption that, by sailing 120° W., he would reach the wealthy trading marts of China, and the result of this conviction was his entering upon that memorable expedition which terminated in the discovery (in 1492) of the continent of America. Although there can be no doubt that the American continent was visited in the 9th and 10th centuries by Northmen, the event remained without influence on the history of discovery, and cannot therefore detract from the claims of Columbus. This momentous discovery, which had been preceded in 1486 by the exploration of the African coast as far as the Cape of Good Hope (which was doubled by Vasco da Gama in 1497), was followed by a rapid succession of discoveries. Within thirty years of the date of the first voyage of Columbus the whole coast of America from Greenland to Cape Horn had been explored, the Pacific Ocean had been navigated, and the world circumnavigated by Magellan (q.v.); the coasts of eastern Africa, Arabia, Persia, and India had been visited by the Portuguese, and numerous islands in the Indian Ocean discovered.
The 16th century was marked by continued attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to extend the sphere of oceanic discovery; and the desire to reach India by a shorter route than those of the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn led to many attempts to discover a north-west passage, which, though they signally failed in their object, had the effect of very materially enlarging our knowledge of the arctic regions. The expeditions of Willoughby and Frobisher in 1553 and 1576, of Davis (1585), Hudson (1607), and Baffin (1616), were the most important in their results towards this end. The 17th and 18th centuries gave a new turn to the study of geography, by bringing other sciences to bear upon it, which, in their turn, derived elucidation from the extension of geographical knowledge; and it is to the aid derived from history, astronomy, and the physical and natural sciences that we owe the completeness which has characterised modern works on geography. In the 17th century the Dutch, under Tasman and Van Diemen, made the Australasian islands known to the civilised world; and in the latter half of the 18th century Captain Cook (q.v.) extended the great oceanic explorations by the discovery of New Zealand and many of the Polynesian groups, and by proving the non-existence of a 'great Antarctic continent,' stretching far north in the Pacific. The antarctic lands were first visited in 1840 by American, English, and French expeditions, under their respective commanders, Wilkes, Ross, and Dumont d'Urville. Polar exploration, after having been for a time in abeyance, has within late years been vigorously prosecuted by the United States and various European countries; and in 1879-80 Baron Nordenskjöld succeeded for the first time in history in navigating the north-east passage round Europe and Asia. In America the travels of Humboldt, Lewis and Clark, Frémont, and others, and the work of the United States and Canadian Surveys, of the Argentine government explorers, and of railway pioneers, have done much to make us acquainted with broad general features, but much remains to be done in regard to special districts of central and southern America. In Asia numerous travellers, geographers, and naturalists, combined with the expeditions of Russian armies, and explorers like the late General Prejevalsky, have contributed to render our knowledge precise and certain in respect to a great part of the continent, whose natural characteristics have been more especially represented by the great physicist Ritter; while we owe a large debt of gratitude to the Jesuit missionaries, whose indefatigable zeal has furnished us with a rich mass of information in regard to minor details of Asiatic life and nature, nor must the work of the Indian
Survey and its European and native explorers be forgotten. In Africa much light has been thrown on the character and condition of the African continent by many of its greatest explorers—as Bruce, Park, Clapperton, the Landers, Burton, Speke, Barth, Vogel, Livingstone, Cameron, Stanley, Thomson, Schweinfurth, Nachtigal, Junker, and Emin Pasha; General Gordon and his subordinate officers; the French in Senegambia and on the Upper Niger; Wissmann and Pogge, and other officers of the Congo Free State; German explorers in east and central Africa, and the missionaries of various denominations. In Australia, although much still remains to be done, the obscurity which hung over the interior has been to a great extent diminished by the explorations of Sturt, Eyre, Leichhardt, and the brothers Gregory; and still more by the highly important labours of Burke and Wills, who in 1860 crossed the Australian continent from Melbourne to Carpentaria. The establishment in 1872 of a telegraph line from Adelaide to Port Darwin right across the continent, and the maintenance of stations along the line, formed an admirable base for further exploration. Giles, Warburton, and Forrest forced their way in nearly parallel lines to the west coast. The labours of these and other explorers indicate that much of the continent of Australia, though often covered with dense growth of spinifex, acacia, and eucalyptus, is not available for colonisation by Europeans.
The government surveys of the various European countries, of the British possessions, and of other civilised states have not only added to a detailed knowledge of the face of the earth, but given us more precise ideas of its shape. Again, various deep-sea exploring expeditions of recent years, the chief among which was that sent out by the English government in the Challenger (q.v.), have added greatly to our knowledge of the geography of the oceans.
The progress of recent discovery has been aided by the encouragement given to exploration by the governments of different countries, and by the efforts of the numerous geographical societies, of which there are now over one hundred; while the constantly increasing mass of information collected by scientific explorers is rapidly diffusing correct information in regard to distant regions.
On the subject of geographical discovery, the following works may be consulted with advantage: Bunbury's History of Ancient Geography (1880); Vivien de Sainte-Martin's Histoire de Géographie; Kiepert's Manual of Ancient Geography (1881); Précis de Géographie Universelle, by Malte Brun; Humboldt's Hist. crit. de l'Hist. de la Géographie, and the Cosmos; Ritter's Asien; Kloeden's Erdkunde; Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie Universelle; Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel, based on Hellwald; H. F. Tozer, A History of Ancient Geography (1897); C. R. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography (1897). And see Petermann's Mitteilungen, the Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., and the Geographisches Jahrbuch.