668 GEOGRAPHY 



with present distributions. All such statistics should be subject to 

 a cartographical treatment no less rigidly accurate than the ordin- 

 ary arithmetical processes. 



The ultimate problem of geography may perhaps be taken as 

 the determination of the influence of the surface forms of the earth 

 on the mental processes of its inhabitants. But a host of minor pro- 

 blems must be solved in cutting the steps by which that culmination 

 may be reached. Let us first find, if possible, what is the true rela- 

 tion between the elevation, slope, and exposure of land and climate; 

 then the exact influence of elevation, slope, soil, exposure, and climate 

 on vegetation; then the relation between all these and agriculture, 

 mining, manufactures, trade, transport, the sites of towns, the polit- 

 ical associations of peoples, and the prosperity of nations. After that 

 we may consider whether it is possible to reduce to a formula, or 

 even to a proposition, the relation between the poetry or the religion 

 of a people and their physical surroundings. The chemist Chenevix 

 wrote a book in two volumes a hundred years ago to demonstrate 

 the inferiority of a particular nation, against one of whom he bore 

 a personal grudge, and he was bold enough to attempt to justify the 

 formula C=/A, where C represented civilization, ^ the latitude, and 

 / a function so delicately adjusted as to make the value of C nega- 

 tive on one side of a channel twenty miles wide and positive on the 

 other! We cannot hope to arrive by any scientific process at so de- 

 finite a formula, but the only way of getting there at all is by forging 

 the links in a chain of cause and effect as unbroken as that which 

 led from the "House that Jack built" to "the priest all shaven and 

 shorn." 



The last of the problems of geography on which I intend to touch 

 is that of the training of geographers. So far as elementary instruc- 

 tion in geography is concerned, I have nothing to say, except that it 

 was bad, it is better, and it seems likely that it will be very good. 

 But between geography as part of the education of a child and geo- 

 graphy as the whole life-work of a man there is a gulf as wide as that 

 between nursery rhymes and the plays of Shakespeare. The train- 

 ing of an elementary teacher in geography should be more thorough 

 and more advanced than that of a child, but it need not be of a dif- 

 ferent order. The teacher, whose special function is teaching, must, 

 like the child, accept the facts of geography from the authorities 

 who are responsible for them. Although the two gifts are sometimes 

 happily combined, an excellent teacher may make but a poor in- 

 vestigator. 



A would-be geographer has at present adequate scope for training 

 in very few universities outside Germany and Austria. Great ad- 

 vances have been made in the United States, but it is only here and 

 there amongst the universities that steps have been taken to secure 



