THE MODERN PRECEPTOR. CHAPTER VI. ON GEOGRAPHY. BY GEOGRAPHY is meant that part of science which teaches the form of this earth which we inhabit, as also its several divisions into quarters, empires, kingdoms, and other states, with their respective boundaries and subdivisions, and the relative positions of countries, cities, towns, mountains, seas, lakes, rivers, and other remarkable objects on the earth's surface. The term geography is formed from two Greek words, signifying, in general, a description of the earth, although the science has been divided into two branches, geography, properly so called, or a description of the land, and hydrography, or a description of the water or sea. On the utility or importance of the study of geography it would be idle to expatiate every person's experience must show that some acquaintance with it is indispensible in the ordinary intercourse and business of society; and hence we find, that to geography the attention of mankind was attracted from the earliest periods of history; at least, YOL, 11. B so far as regarded descriptions of the various positions of the earth. The art, however, of representing such portions of the earth, on a plane surface, cannot well be traced back beyond the days of the Greek philosopher Thales, and his successor Anaximander, who, about the year 580 before the Christian era, produced a geographical table, perhaps a map, exhibiting the situation of Greece and the neighbouring countries. After Anaximander came a succession of geographers, of whose writings, in general, only imperfect fragments have come down to our times: but, at last, in the reign of Augustus Cæsar, about the year 19 of Christ, appeared Strabo, a native of Amasia, in Lesser Asia, who composed a general system of geography, which has, happily, been preserved to our day, and which, besides topographical and historical informations concerning all such parts of the earth as were then known, many of which he had visited, contains sundry curious discussions on disputed points of geography, together with numerous extracts from the writings of prior travellers and geographers, which, but for Strabo's work, would have been utterly lost to the world, Still, however, was wanting a treatise which, to the informations contained in the writings of Strabo and his predecessors, should add the philosophical and geometrical principles on which geography rests, as forming a part of the science of the universe. Such a treatise was produced, about a century and a half after Strabo, by Ptolemy the Alexandrian, containing instructions for the due construction of maps, for the representation of a sphere on a plane surface, and for determining the positions of countries, towns, &c. agrecably to their proper and relative situations on the surface of the earth, as ascertained by what is termed their latitude and longitude. Of modern geographers it may be sufficient to mention the names of De Lisle and D'Anville in France, particularly the |