The history of ancient geography and ethnography after the revival of letters, is the same as that of all other studies connected with the investigation of antiquity. After the restoration of learning, all information about ancient geography was sought exclusively in the ancient authors; the whole of the middle ages had added nothing to it; whatever advances were made, proceeded from practical men, and not from the learned. The consequence of this state of things was the unfortunate separation of dead learning from practical life: the knowledge of the learned had its root in their books, and was thereby spoiled in its very beginning; it is true, all erudition is based on books, but it must be amalgamated with practical knowledge. To transfer that which was handed down in books to the actual, visible world was a very difficult task, and the acquisition of practical experience was no part of a scholar’s business. This state of things remained the prevailing evil until the 17th century; and during that period, the ἰδιῶται were much more learned than the λόγιοι. The first attempts of geographers consisted of lifeless compilations from ancient books; and only that which was not found in them was sparingly derived from the actual and living knowledge. The most striking example of this kind is Raphael Volaterranus, in that part of his Encyclopaedia, in which he treats of geography; for in describing the countries of Europe, which had become entirely changed, he copies Pliny and Mela, and it is not till they cease to furnish him with information, that he borrows a few things from the actual knowledge of his time. Although he lived at Rome, he describes it as it had been a thousand years before him. In the East, and especially at Constantinople, the maps of Ptolemy were used throughout the middle ages—whether the same was the case in Italy, I cannot decide; the earliest Italian maps are not older than the fifteenth century. The maps of Ptolemy were then brought over to the western countries; and from them the learned formed some sort of notion of the geographical and ethnographical knowledge of the ancients. But as early as the thirteenth century—the Arabs had done so even before—the Venetians, Genoese, and Catalanians had become acquainted with the Greek and Arabic maps, and it was these unlearned men that, in extending geographical knowledge, took these maps as their basis, and remodelled them into new and practical maps, especially sea-charts, which they had so much improved. But this was unknown to the scholars of the fifteenth century; and even in the sixteenth, their ignorance is almost inconceivable. It was not till the seventeenth century that the nations of western Europe arrived at the age of maturity; that century checked this irrational philological tendency, and for a time, philology itself; it gave a different direction to scholarship, and thus laid the foundation of our modern philology. The time had now come, when a living