Applied Geography Author:John Scott Keltie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III. THE GEOGRAPHY OF AFRICA IN ITS BEARINGS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONTINENT. IN the previous chapter I stated that had the Geography of Afric... more »a been different from what it is, that Continent would have been taken seriously in hand by the leading nations of Europe long ago. For mark that Africa is part of the old world. As far back as we may go it seems to have been known to the peoples who have had the making of the world's history. One of the oldest, if not the oldest, civilizations of which we know anything grew up on its soil; the ancient monuments of Egypt attest the greatness of the civilization to which that country attained ages before those of Greece and Rome were born, and while Europe was still the home of barbarians. At a much later period civilization of a different stamp grew up along the Mediterranean shores of the continent. There was Carthage, for example, to whose enterprise reference has already been made. At a much later period the conquering Moslems founded what are known as the Barbary States, one of which, Morocco, exists to this day in a state of semi-barbarous independence, while another, Tripoli, is attached to the great Moslem Power, Turkey. Abyssinia is anothersemi-civilized state of native growth, which has been in existence since about the beginning of the Christian era We have already alluded to the enterprise of the Portuguese, and to their great navigator Vasco da Gama, who was the first to find his way to India by the Cape. Beginning about 1436 the enterprising adventurers of Portugal in about 60 years, in their tiny ships, not much bigger than cock-boats, had practically gone round the whole west, south, and east coasts of Africa, and by the early part of the 16th century had virtually annexed the whole stretch from Morocco to n...« less