54 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



GEOGKAPHICAL EVOLUTION* 



By Professor AKCHIBALD GEIKIE, F. E. S. 



I. 



IN the quaint preface to his " Navigations and Voyages of the Eng- 

 lish Nation," Hakluyt calls geography and chronology " the sunne 

 and moone, the right eye and the left of all history." The position 

 thus claimed for geography three hundred years ago hy the great 

 English chronicler was not accorded by his successors, and has hardly 

 been admitted even now. The functions of the geographer and the 

 traveler, popularly assumed to be identical, have been supposed to con- 

 sist in descriptions of foreign countries, their climate, productions, and 

 inhabitants, bristling on the one hand with dry statistics, and relieved 

 on the other by as copious an introduction as may be of stirring ad- 

 venture and personal anecdote. There has, indeed, been much to jus- 

 tify this popular assumption. It was not until the key-note of its 

 future progress was struck by Karl Ritter, within the present century, 

 that geography advanced beyond the domain of travelers' tales and 

 desultory observation into that of orderly, methodical, scientific prog- 

 ress. This branch of inquiry, however, is now no longer the pursuit 

 of mere numerical statistics, nor the chronicle of marvelous and often 

 questionable adventures by flood and fell. It seeks to present a lumi- 

 nous picture of the earth's surface, its various forms of configuration, 

 its continents, islands, and oceans, its mountains, valleys, and plains, 

 its rivers and lakes, its climates, plants, and animals. It thus endeav- 

 ors to produce a picture which shall not be one of mere topographical 

 detail. It ever looks for a connection between scattered facts, tries to 

 ascertain the relations which subsist between the different parts of the 

 globe, their reactions on each other and the function of each in the 

 general economy of the whole. Modern geography studies the distri- 

 bution of vegetable and animal life over the earth's surface, with the 

 action and reaction between it and the surrounding inorganic world. 

 It traces how man, alike unconsciously and knowingly, has changed 

 the face of nature, and how, on the other hand, the conditions of his 

 geographical environment have molded his own progress. 



With these broad aims, geography comes frankly for assistance to 

 many different branches of science. It does not, however, claim in any 

 measure to occupy their domain. It brings to the consideration of their 

 problems a central human interest, in which these sciences are some- 

 times apt to be deficient ; for it demands first of all to know how the 

 problems to be solved bear upon the position and history of man and 

 of this marvelously ordered world wherein he finds himself undisputed 

 lord. Geography freely borrows from meteorology, physics, chemistry, 

 * A Lecture delivered at the Evening Meeting, March 24, 1879. 



