Geography is not to be separated from History. Up to the end of the sixteenth century, Ptolemy's Geography, corrected, modified, altered, according to the reports of navigators, had been the scientific standard, but uncertain, vacillating, and self-contradictory. From the earlier part of the seventeenth century, the astronomical observations, sent from the far East by the Jesuit missionaries, emphasized the need of a general reform, already sufficiently evident. Father Riccioli, assisted by Father Grimaldi, who is known in science as one of the precursors of Newton, undertook, in his _Geographia Reformata_, the reform of Geography by means of Astronomy.[171] For this purpose, he created first his own metrology, identifying, and reducing to a common denomination, all the measures received in reports from different parts of the earth. The first eclipse of the moon which he makes mention of, among his astronomical reports, had been observed on the night of November 8, 1612, by Father Scheiner at Ingolstadt and by Father Charles Spinola at Nangasaki in Japan. At the time that Riccioli was writing, the Jesuit missionaries had multiplied in China. Adam Schall died in 1666, holding the post of President of the Mathematical Tribunal at Pekin; he was followed by Ferdinand Verbiest; and then a long line of imperial astronomers of the Celestial Empire, Koegler, Hallerstein, Seixas, Francesco, De Rocha, Espinha, continued to send their reports, either to the colleges of their respective Provinces, or to other mathematical centres, or to the learned societies in Europe, whereof not a few Jesuits were members. Meanwhile, scientific returns from Hindustan, Siam, Thibet, on one side of the globe, and from San Domingo on the other side, poured into the Collège Louis-le-Grand, and made of this educational centre an indispensable auxiliary to the Bureau of Longitudes. All this, reacting on education, was received with satisfaction by the general world, and drew the pedagogic bodies steadily, though with some difficulty, on the line of progress. The University of Paris was quite tardy in following up the steps of the Jesuits.[172]