ng the art of the explorer, or
in raising the standard of the work required of him, as the enormous
interest that for thirty years past has centred in African exploration.
The larger part of the best achievements of the explorers of the present
generation in scientific investigation, and in an approach to scientific
map-making, are found in tropical Africa. Many of the hundreds of the
route surveys are not unworthy to be compared with those of Pogge and
Wissmann, when they laid down on their map every cultural and
topographic feature for two miles on both sides of their route, from
Angola to the Upper Congo. The extreme care with which some of the best
explorers have performed their tasks is illustrated by the remarkable
achievement of the late Dr. Junker along the Mobangi River. After years
of service, his scientific equipment had become practically worthless.
He started on his four-hundred-mile journey down the river through the
jungle, with absolutely no instrument except a compass to aid him in
determining his positions. Endeavoring, by the most scrupulous care, to
make up as far as possible for his lack of scientific outfit, he trudged
through the grass, compass in hand, counting every step. Every fifteen
minutes he jotted in his notebook the distance and the mean direction
travelled. At night he used these accumulated data to lay down on his
route map the journey of the day. For many weeks he kept up this trying
routine till he reached his furthest west, and again till he had
returned to his starting-point, whose latitude and longitude he had
previously determined. When he returned to Europe, Dr. Hassenstein and
he made a map from the data Junker had collected, and fixed the position
of his furthest west. This position was found later by the astronomical
observations of Lieutenant Le Marinel to be less than two miles out
of the way.

One of the latest to win a large prize in African discovery is Dr. A.
Donaldson Smith, a young physician of Philadelphia, in the northeastern
region known as Somaliland and Gallaland. His method may be mentioned
here as an illustration of the kind of work that geographers now
require. Before he began his explorations, he took a thorough course in
the use of surveying instruments and the methods of accurately laying
down his positions and making a route map. Many a cartographer, burning
with desire to draw a good map of a newly explored region, has been
driven to despair by the inadequ