If we look to maps for information, here again we are disappointed. Latterly the coast is outlined and described with reasonable completeness; so also are the islands. This is the contribution of navigators and of recent Russian charts. But the interior is little more than a blank, calling to mind “the unhabitable downs,” where, according to Swift, the old geographers “place elephants for want of towns.” I have already referred to what purports to be a “General Map of the Russian Empire,” published by the Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg in 1776, and republished at London in 1780, where Russian America does not appear. I might mention also that Captain Cook complained in his day of the Russian maps as “singularly erroneous.” On the return of the expedition, English maps recorded his explorations and the names he assigned to different parts of the coast. These were reproduced in St. Petersburg, and the Russian copy was then reproduced in London, so that geographical knowledge was very little advanced. Some of the best maps of this region are by Germans, who excel in maps. I mention an excellent one of the Aleutian Islands and the neighboring coasts, especially to illustrate their orography and geology, which will be found at the end of the volume of Transactions of the Imperial Mineralogical Society at St. Petersburg to which I have already referred. Late maps attest the tardiness of information. Here, for instance, is an excellent map of North America, purporting to be published by the Geographical Institute of Weimar as late as 1859, on which we have the Yukon pictured, very much like the Niger in Africa, as a large river meandering in the interior with no outlet to the sea. Here also is a Russian map of this very region, as late as 1861, where the course of the Yukon is left in doubt. On other maps, as in the Physical Atlas of Keith Johnston, it is presented, under another name, entering into the Frozen Ocean. But the secret is penetrated at last. Recent discovery, by the enterprise of our citizens in the service of the Telegraph Company, fixes that this river is an affluent of the Kwichpak, as the Missouri is an affluent of the Mississippi, and enters into Behring Sea by many mouths, between the parallels of 62° and 63°. After the death of Major Kennicott, a division of his party, with nothing but a skin boat, ascended the river to Fort Yukon, where it bifurcates, and descended it again to Nulato, thus establishing the entire course from its sources in the Rocky Mountains for a distance exceeding a thousand miles. I have before me now an outline map just prepared by our Coast Survey, where this correction is made. But this is only a harbinger of the maturer labors of our accomplished bureau, when the coasts of this region are under the jurisdiction of the United States.