Roy Bridges has brought his importance to notice.  Building on a two-part article in the Geographical Journal in 1976, an account of the foundation of the Hakluyt Society in Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth of 1996, and the account he wrote for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Bridges has now produced a comprehensive study of Cooley for Geographers Biobibliography  27 (2008).  This introduces new evidence on Cooley’s antecedents and suggests that a key to understanding his work may be that he was a product of late eighteenth-century Enlightenment type teaching at Trinity College Dublin who never fully came to terms with the scientific developments in the natural sciences which were to transform geography in the nineteenth century.