2. As all knowledge is perfected slowly and gradually, so man’s knowledge of the earth and its configuration forms no exception to this general rule. Of the few attempts of early antiquity to enlarge the domain of geographical knowledge, tradition tells us only of the Argonautic expedition of the Greeks, of the voyage of the Phœnicians to Ophir, and their bolder circumnavigation of Africa. With the conception of the spherical form of the earth the still vague notion of climatal zones makes its appearance, and to this, four centuries before Christ, Pytheas of Marseilles gave the first scientific elucidation and the first approximation to modern theories by his doctrine of the Polar Circle. Almost contemporaneously Alexander’s expedition to the wonder-land of India created a paradise for commerce and navigation, to secure which a shortened route, _the route through the ice_—the most perverse notion that ever entered into the mind of man to conceive—was one thousand eight hundred years afterwards eagerly and passionately sought. 3. Rome had extended her knowledge to Scandinavia, and Seneca’s prophetical mind foresaw the discovery of new worlds. But the deluge of religious strifes, the migrations of nations in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, the holy zeal for destruction in the apostles to the heathen, proved formidable barriers to the extension of geographical knowledge, which were broken through only by the piratical hordes of Normans so renowned in story. While the Romans boasted that Britain had never been circumnavigated, the Normans, throwing the deeds of the Phœnicians into the shade, discovered Greenland, and became _the first Polar Navigators_. 4. Travels by land were the principal means by which the geographical knowledge of the world was enriched; but during the Middle Ages the information which travellers communicated, uncertain and superficial even for Europe, served only to supply food for the fancies of map-makers, as far as the distant parts of the world were concerned. 5. But the grand moment at length arrived in the history of mankind when the civilization of the West, looking beyond the narrow horizon of the Old World, and awaking from the geographical dreams of centuries, burst the fetters of tradition, and within three hundred years perfected the knowledge of our planet up to the Pole.