ABSTRACT
For the next eighteen centuries, which some modern geographers refer to as the 'Classical Period', professional geographers, both in the West and in the East, accumulated a vast body of information on both the animate and inanimate in various parts of the known world. Since its inception, the Royal Geographical Society, for example, has always honoured as Fellows those who extend the geographical frontier by exploring the hitherto unknown, be it the Antarctic or the 'Dark Continent'. Rich as this body of information might be, it has often been considered as a catalogue of human and physical phenomena of the less familiar places of the Earth. 'Travelogue' is the word often used to describe much of it.
