write a note on the scientific discoveries that led to the development of geography in 19th century
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Answer: as people travel, they encounter different environments and peoples. Such variations are intellectually stimulating: Why do people and places differ? Stores of knowledge were built up about such new and exotic places, as demonstrated by the Greek philosopher and world traveler Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. That knowledge became known as geography, a term first used as the title of Eratosthenes of Cyrene’s book Geographica in the 3rd century BCE. Such was the volume of knowledge compiled thereafter that Strabo’s Geography, published three centuries later, comprised 17 volumes. Its first two provided a wide-ranging review of previous writings, and the other 15 contained descriptions of particular parts of what was then the known world. Soon thereafter Ptolemy collated a large amount of information about the latitude and longitude of places in his seminal work. The Greeks and Romans not only accumulated a great body of knowledge about Earth but also developed the sciences of astronomy and mapmaking, which helped them accurately locate places. However, during western Europe’s Migration period (Dark Ages), much of that wisdom was lost, but the study of geography—notably cartography—was nurtured in the Arab world. This material became known to western Europeans during medieval times, partly through their contacts with the Muslim world during the Crusades. As the Europeans linked this new material with what. they could rediscover in ancient Greek and Roman work, they frequently stressed misinformation derived from the latter, notably in Ptolemy’s inaccurate maps. From then on, as Europeans explored more of the world, increasing numbers of scholars collated new information and transmitted it to wider audiences.
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