158 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



measured. A sentence from Guyot's Earth and Man may here be 

 taken as a guide: "To describe, without rising to the causes, or de- 

 scending to the consequences, is no more science than merely and 

 simply to relate a fact of which one has been a witness." There could 

 hardly be devised a more concise and searching test of good work than 

 this quotation suggests. The causes, in so far as the physical geography 

 of the lands is concerned, have been learned chiefly through the study 

 of geology; yet it does not by any means follow that all geologists 

 are possessed of such knowledge of these causes as will constitute them 

 geographers. The consequences have been learned through the study 

 of evolutionary biology; yet a distinct addition to the usual discipline 

 of biology is required in order to apprehend its geographical correla- 

 tions. The limited space allowed to this article will require that 

 further consideration of the consequences be excluded, in order to give 

 due consideration to the causes. 



One of the preparatory steps in the century's advance was taken 

 by the German geographer, Eitter, who, near the beginning of the cen- 

 tury, advocated a new principle that may be illustrated by the change 

 in the definition of geography from "the description of the earth and its 

 inhabitants" to "the study of the earth in relation to its inhabitants;" 

 but advance beyond this beginning was for a long time obstructed by 

 certain ancient beliefs. Theological preconceptions as to the age of the 

 earth and the associated geological doctrine of catastrophism, although 

 attacked by the rising school of uniformitarianism, were then domi- 

 nant. They gave to the geographer a ready-made earth, on which the 

 existing processes of change were unimportant. Furthermore, the be- 

 lief in the separate creation of every organic species led to the doctrine 

 of teleology, which maintained the predetermined fitness of the earth 

 for its inhabitants, and of its inhabitants for their lifework. All this 

 had to be outgrown before geographers could understand the slow de- 

 velopment of land forms and the progressive adaptation of all living 

 beings to their environments. Yet the beginning that Ritter made was 

 of great importance, and it would have led further had it not happened 

 that for many decades professors of geography in Europe brought 

 chiefly a historical training to their chairs, to the almost entire neglect 

 of physical geography. In the last thirty years there has been a re- 

 action from this condition in Germany and France, but Italy, with 

 many professors of geography in her universities, still for the most part 

 follows historical methods. 



Id the victory of the uniformitarians over the catastrophists began 

 the fortunate alliance of geography with geology, which was long after- 

 wards happily phrased by Mackinder: "Geology considers the past in 

 the light of the present; geography considers the present in the light 

 of the past." Instead of believing in cataclysmic upheavals and in 



