Tyrolese Father Martini († 1661): "He is the best geographer of all the missionaries, and by his great work, the Novus Atlas Sinensis, the best and most complete description which we possess of China, he has become the 'Father of Chinese geography.'" Father Du Halde gave an accurate description of Mongolia, and his great work on China (1735) is still one of the most important sources available on the geography, history, religion, industry, political organization, customs, etc., of that country.[1] Some of the geographical labors of the Jesuits in America have been mentioned previously.[2] Justin Winsor states that the Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias of Father de Acosta, "the Pliny of the New World," is much relied on as an authority by Robertson, and quoted 19 times by Prescott in his Conquest of Peru, thus taking the fourth place as an authority with regard to that work.[3]
All these works are as many testimonies to the efficiency and the practical character of the system under which these men had been trained; most of them had entered the Society at a very early age. How could they have produced such works, if what Compayré says, were true, that the Society devotes itself exclusively to "purely formal studies, to exercises which give a training in the use of elegant lan-
- ↑ China, vol. I, pp. 650-692. – See Dahlmann, l. c., pp. 35-37. – Huonder, Deutsche Jesuiten-Missionare des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Herder, 1899), pp. 86-89.
- ↑ Chapter IV, pp. 127-129.
- ↑ Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. I, pp. 262-263. On the works of Father Clavigero on Mexico see ib., p. 158.
