It was the first work to have covered seriously the topic of communication between the different parts of the globe, and to have treated "exploration" as a historical process. It was translated into French, Dutch and Italian. In 1852 Cooley published "Inner Africa laid open", an attempt to trace the major lines of communication across the continent south of the Equator. In this work, relying based on Portuguese and African sources, he maintained that there existed just one great lake in Central Africa, and that the snowy mountains reported by Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann were myths. Cooley contributed to the "Journal of the Royal Geographical Society", and wrote a series of controversial articles on African subjects to the "Athenæum". With some treatises on geometry, he also published: