526 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE SCIENCE OF DISTANCES.* 



- By Sir GEORGE S. ROBERTSON, K. C. S. I. 



WHEN the British Association for the Advancement of Science 

 honored me with an invitation to preside over this Section, I 

 accepted the distinction, thoughtfully and with sincere gratification. 

 The selection as your president at Bradford, this great and interesting 

 center of commercial energy, of a student of political movements who 

 was also deeply interested in the science of geography, seemed to 

 point suggestively to a particular branch of our subject as appropriate 

 for an opening address. This consideration, and, to my thinking, the 

 fitness of the occasion, led me to believe that the British Empire itself 

 was a very proper subject for such reflections as could be compressed 

 within the limits of an inaugural Presidential Address. Many of my 

 predecessors have eloquently and wisely dealt with various topics of 

 admitted geographical rectitude — with geography in its more strictly 

 scientific study, Math its nature and its purview, with its recent progress, 

 and with the all-important question of how it could be best taught 

 methodically and how most profitably it might be studied. In dealing 

 with the important practical application of our science to the facts of 

 National life — Political geography — I feel that perhaps a word of ex- 

 planation is necessary. Pure geography, with its placid aloofness and its 

 far-stretching outlook, combined sometimes with a too rigid devotion to 

 the facts and conclusions of strict geographical research, is apt to incline 

 many scientific minds to an admirable quiet-eyed cosmopolitanism — 

 the cosmopolitanism of the cloistered college or the lecture theater. It 

 perhaps also at times has a tendency to create in purely academic stu- 

 dents a feeling of half disdain or of amicable irritability against those 

 who love the science for its political and social suggestiveness and eluci- 

 dations. Thus there is a possible danger that geographers of high intel- 

 lectual caliber, with enthusiasms entirely scholarly, may come to under- 

 rate Nationality and to look upon the world and mankind as the 

 units, and upon people and confederacies and amalgamations merely as 

 specific instances of the general type. We know that geography is often 

 looked upon as the science of foreign countries more especially. Such 

 mental confusion is undoubtedly less common than it was, yet it still 

 i ufluences, unconsciously, the minds of many people. It is well not to 



* Address of the president of the Geographical Section of the British Associ- 

 ntion for the Advancement of Science, Bradford, 1900. 



