and began to attract the attention of the first
authorities. D'Anville's studies embraced everything of geographical
nature in the world's literature, as far as he could master it: for this
purpose he not only searched ancient and modern historians, travellers
and narrators of every description, but also poets, orators and
philosophers. One of his cherished objects was to reform geography by
putting an end to the blind copying of older maps, by testing the
commonly accepted positions of places through a rigorous examination of
all the descriptive authority, and by excluding from cartography every
name inadequately supported. Vast spaces, which had before been covered
with countries and cities, were thus suddenly reduced almost to a blank.

D'Anville was at first employed in the humbler task of illustrating by
maps the works of different travellers, such as Marchais, Charlevoix,
Labat and Duhalde. For the history of China by the last-named writer he
was employed to make an atlas, which was published separately at the
Hague in 1737. In 1735 and 1736 he brought out two treatises on the
figure of the earth; but these attempts to solve geometrical problems by
literary material were, to a great extent, refuted by Maupertuis'
measurements of a degree within the polar circle. D'Anville's historical
method was more successful in his 1743 map of Italy, which first
indicated numerous errors in the mapping of that country, and was
accompanied by a valuable memoir (a novelty in such work), showing in
full the sources of the design. A trigonometrical survey which Benedict
XIV. soon after had made in the papal states strikingly confirmed the
French geographer's results. In his later years d'Anville did yeoman
service for ancient and medieval geography, accomplishing something like
a revolution in the former; mapping afresh all the chief countries of
the pre-Christian civilizations (especially Egypt), and by his _Memoire
et abrege de geographie ancienne et generale_ and his _Etats formes en
Europe apres la chute de l'empire romain en occident_ (1771) rendering
his labours still more generally useful. In 1754, at the age of
fifty-seven, he became a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et
Belles Lettres, whose transactions he enriched with many papers. In 1775
he received the only place in the Academie des Sciences which is
allotted to geography; and in the same year he was appointed, without
solicitation, first geographer to the king