THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE LANDS. 161 



Gran, Theiss, Temes, Aluta, Sereth, and Pruth. Many of these are large 

 streams with other important tributaries. The Danube drains upwards 

 of 300.000 square miles of country." 



A decided advance over earlier books in the way of rational or 

 explanatory treatment is found in the works of Peschel and Eeclus; it 

 is to the former that a reaction against the historical treatment of 

 geography in Germany is largely dne; while the latter is to be credited 

 with an enlarged attention to the detail of land forms; but the books of 

 neither of these authors recognize the systematic evolution of land 

 forms. The same may be said of various other treatises which approach, 

 but do not yet reach, the ideal that seems to be in sight. One of the 

 chief responsibilities of the geographer— the description of landscape — 

 can not be fully met by students who accept the principles set forth in 

 these books as their guides; for in spite of the increasing attention 

 given to the lands in modern books, and in spite of the greater number 

 of forms recognized, the combination of all forms in a well-organized 

 whole is not yet accomplished. 



It seems to have been against the empirical method of such books as 

 Ansted's that Huxley protested in his 'Physiography,' urging its re- 

 placement by a more educative method. He wrote: 



"I do not think that a description of the earth, which commences 

 by telling a child that it is an oblate spheriod, moving around the sun 

 in an elliptical orbit, and ends without giving him the slightest hint 

 towards an understanding of the ordnance map of his own country, or 

 any suggestion as to the meaning of the phenomena offered by the 

 brook which runs through his village, or of the gravel pit whence the 

 roads are mended, is calculated either to interest or to instruct. . . . 

 Physiography has very little to do with this sort of Physical Geogra- 

 phy. My hearers were not troubled with much about latitudes and 

 longitudes, the heights of mountains, depths of seas, or the geographical 

 distribution of kangaroos or Compositae .... I endeavored to 

 give them .... a view of the 'place in nature' of a particular 

 district of England — the basin of the Thames — and to leave upon their 

 minds the impression that the muddy waters of our metropolitan river, 

 the hills between which it flows, the breezes which blow over it, are not 

 isolated phenomena, to be taken as understood because they are famil- 

 iar. On the contrary, I endeavored to show that the application of the 

 plainest and simplest processes of reasoning to any one of these 

 phenomena suffices to show, lying behind it, a cause, which again sug- 

 gests another; until, step by step, the conviction dawns upon the learner 

 that, to attain to even an elementary conception of what goes on in his 

 own parish, he must know something about the universe; that the 

 pebble he kicks aside would not be what it is and where it is, unless 

 a particular chapter of the earth's history, finished untold ages ago, had 



VOL. LVII.— 11 



