656 GEOGRAPHY 



ered to be fundamentally physical, but physical geography formed the 

 introduction and key to all other possible geographies, of which he 

 enumerated five: mathematical, concerned with the form, size, and 

 movements of the Earth and its place in the solar system; moral, tak- 

 ing account of the customs and characters of mankind according to 

 their physical surroundings; political, concerning the divisions of the 

 land into the territories of organized governments; mercantile, or, as 

 we now call it, commercial geography; and theological, which took 

 account of the distribution of religions. It is not so much the cleavage 

 of geography into five branches, all springing from physical geography 

 like the fingers from a hand, which is worthy of remark, but rather the 

 recognition of the interaction of the conditions of physical geography 

 with all other geographical conditions. The scheme of geography 

 thus acquired unity and flexibility such as it had not previously at- 

 tained, but Kant's views have never received wide recognition. If his 

 geographical lectures have been translated, no English or French edi- 

 tion has come under my notice; and such currency as they obtained 

 in Germany was checked by the more concrete and brilliant work of 

 Humboldt, and the teleological system elaborated in overwhelming 

 detail by Ritter. 



Ritter's views were substantially those of Paley. The world, he 

 found, fitted its inhabitants so well that it was obviously made for 

 them down to the minutest detail. The theory was one peculiarly 

 acceptable in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and it had 

 the immensely important result of leading men to view the Earth as 

 a great unit, with all its parts coordinated to one end. It gave a philo- 

 sophical, we may even say a theological, character to the study of 

 geography. 



Kant had also pointed to unity, but from another side, that of 

 evolution. It was not until after Charles Darwin had fully restored 

 the doctrine of evolution to modern thought that it was forced upon 

 thinking men that the fitness of the Earth to its inhabitants might 

 result, not from its being made for them, but from their having been 

 shaped by it. The influence of terrestrial environment upon the life of 

 a people may have been exaggerated by some writers, - - by Buckle, 

 in his History of Civilization, for example, - - but it is certain that 

 this influence is a potent one. The relation between the forms of the 

 solid crust of the Earth and all the other phenomena of the surface 

 constitutes the very essence of geography. 



It is a fact that many branches of the study of the Earth's surface 

 which were included in the cosmography of the sixteenth century, the 

 physiography of Linnseus, the physical geography of Humboldt, and 

 perhaps even the Erdkunde of Ritter, have been elaborated by special- 

 ists into studies which, for their full comprehension, require the whole 

 attention of the student; but it does not follow that these specializa- 



