AFRICA AS KNOWN IN 1676 (from Dapper's _Atlas_).--This includes a knowledge of most of the African river sand lakes due to the explorations of the Portuguese. AFRICA (made specially for this volume, to show chief explorations and partition).--The names of the explorers are given at the foot of the map itself. NORTH POLAR REGIONS, WESTERN HALF (prepared specially for the present volume from the _Citizen's Atlas_, by kind permission of Messrs. Bartholomew).--This gives the results of the discoveries due to Franklin expeditions and most of the searchers after the North-West Passage. NORTH POLAR REGIONS, EASTERN HALF.--This gives the Siberian coast investigated by the Russians and Nordenskiold, as well as Nansen's _Farthest North_. CLIMBING THE NORTH POLE (prepared specially for this volume). Giving in graphic form the names of the chief Arctic travellers and the latitude N. reached from John Davis (1587) to Nansen (1895). THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY INTRODUCTION How was the world discovered? That is to say, how did a certain set of men who lived round the Mediterranean Sea, and had acquired the art of recording what each generation had learned, become successively aware of the other parts of the globe? Every part of the earth, so far as we know, has been inhabited by man during the five or six thousand years in which Europeans have been storing up their knowledge, and all that time the inhabitants of each part, of course, were acquainted with that particular part: the Kamtschatkans knew Kamtschatka, the Greenlanders, Greenland; the various tribes of North American Indians knew, at any rate, that part of America over which they wandered, long before Columbus, as we say, "discovered" it. Very often these savages not only know their own country, but can express their knowledge in maps of very remarkable accuracy. Cortes traversed over 1000 miles through Central America, guided only by a calico map of a local cacique. An Eskimo named Kalliherey drew out, from his own knowledge of the coast between Smith Channel and Cape York, a map of it, varying only in minute details from the Admiralty chart. A native of Tahiti, named Tupaia, drew out for Cook a map of the Pacific, extending over forty-five degrees of longitude (nearly 3000 miles), giving the relative size and position of the main islands over that huge tract of ocean. Almost all geographical discoveries by Europeans have, in like manner, been brought about by means of guides, who necessarily knew the country which their European masters wished to "discover."