ON MOUNTAINS AND MANKIND. 543 



ON MOUNTAINS AND MANKIND. 



By DOUGLAS W. FRESH FIELD, 



PRESIDENT OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL SECTION OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 



WE have all of us seen hills, or what we call hills, from the mon- 

 strous protuberances of the Andes and the Himalaya to such 

 puny pimples as lie about the edges of your fens. Next to a waterfall, 

 the first natural object (according to my own experience) to impress 

 itself on a child's mind is a hill, some spot from which he can enlarge 

 his horizon. Hills, and still more mountains, attract the human im- 

 agination and curiosity. The child soon asks, ' Tell me, how were 

 mountains made ? ' a question easier to ask than to answer, which oc- 

 cupied the lifetime of the father of mountain science, De Saussure. 

 But there are mountains and mountains. Of all natural objects the 

 most impressive is a vast snowy peak rising as a white island above the 

 waves of green hills — a fragment of the arctic world left behind to 

 commemorate its past predominance — and bearing on its broad shoul- 

 ders a garland of the Alpine flora that has been destroyed on the lower 

 ground by the rising tide of heat and drought that succeeded the last 

 glacial epoch. Mid-summer snows, whether seen from the slopes of 

 the Jura or the plains of Lombardy, above the waves of the Euxine or 

 through the glades of the tropical forests of Sikhim, stir men's imag- 

 inations and rouse their curiosity. Before, however, we turn to con- 

 sider some of the physical aspects of mountains, I shall venture, speak- 

 ing as I am here to a literary audience, and in a university town, to 

 dwell for a few minutes on their place in literature — in the mirror that 

 reflects in turn the mind of the passing ages. For geography is con- 

 cerned with the interaction between man and nature in its widest sense. 

 There has been recently a good deal of writing on this subject — I can 

 not say of discussion, for of late years writers have generally taken the 

 same view. That view is that the love of mountains is an invention 

 of the nineteenth century, and that in previous ages they had been gen- 

 erally looked on either with indifference or positive dislike, rising in 

 some instances to abhorrence. Extreme examples have been repeat- 

 edly quoted. We have all heard of the bishop who thought the devil 

 was allowed to put in mountains after the fall of man ; of the English 

 scribe in the tenth century who invoked ' the bitter blasts of glaciers 

 and the Pennine host of demons' on the violaters of the charters he 

 was employed to draft. The examples on the other side have been com- 

 paratively neglected. It seems time they were insisted on. 



