HALLEY'S WORK AS A GEOGRAPHER

Abstract

THE remarkable progress made in geography in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries owed much to a distinguished band of scholars at Oxford. This progress was made in two branches of the subject. On one hand, there was a large output of cosmographical works in which the authors, who were also teachers at Oxford, tried to present the rapidly growing geographical knowledge of the world. On the other hand, mathematicians developed that side of geography which was closely related to navigation. It was one of the duties of the Savilian professor of astronomy to deal particularly with this aspect of the subject, although in practice his colleague, the Savilian professor of geometry, seems to have been equally interested and active. Halley held the chair of geometry, and the more important part of his contribution to geography is attractively dealt with by Prof. S. Chapman in his paper “Edmund Halley as Physical Geographer and the Story of his Charts”(Occasional Notes, Roy. Astron. Soc., No. 9, June, 1941).