The northern shores of Greenland, and its extent in this direction are
still unknown.
Notwithstanding the zeal and success with which the government of the
United States prosecute their discoveries to the west of the Mississippi,
there is still much unexplored country between that river and the Pacific
Ocean. It is possible that lands may lie within the antartic circle, of
which we have hitherto as little notion as we had of South Shetland ten
years ago; but if there are such, they must be most barren and
inhospitable. It is possible also, that, notwithstanding the care and
attention with which the great Pacific has been so repeatedly swept, there
may yet be islands in it undiscovered; but these, however fertile from soil
and climate, must be mere specks in the ocean.
But though comparatively little of the surface of the globe is now utterly
unknown, yet even of those countries with which we are best acquainted,
much remains to be ascertained, before the geography of them can justly be
regarded as complete. Perhaps we are much less deficient and inaccurate in
our knowledge of the natural history of the globe, than in its geography,
strictly so called; that is, in the extent, direction, latitudes and
longitudes, direction and elevation of mountains, rise, course, and
termination of rivers, &c. How grossly erroneous geography was till very
lately, in some even of its most elementary parts, and those, too, in
relation to what ought to have been the most accurately known portion of
Europe, may be judged from these two facts,--that till near the close of
the last century, the distance from the South Foreland, in Kent, to the
Land's End, was laid down in all the maps of England nearly half a degree
greater than it actually is; and that, as we have formerly noticed, "the
length of the Mediterranean was estimated by the longitudes of Ptolemy till
the eighteenth century, and that it was curtailed of nearly twenty-five
degrees by observation, no farther back than the reign of Louis XIV.
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