240 DAVIS — SYSTEMATIC GEOGRAPHY. [Aprils, 



examples of greater complexity, but always selecting important rather 

 than trivial matters; but the investigator must study the trivial items 

 along with the greater ones, and all must be duly scrutinized, 

 described and classified. 



4. Physiography and Ontography. — Let it then be here agreed 

 that the whole content of geography is the study of the relation of 

 the earth and its inhabitants. We thus see two prime divisions of 

 the subject. One includes all the elements of the physical environ- 

 ment of life \ the other all those responses which life has made to 

 its environment ; and in accordance with modern methods both of 

 these divisions should be treated under the explanatory principles 

 of evolution, inorganic and organic. It is the element of relation- 

 ship between the physical environment and the environed organism, 

 between physiography and ontography (to coin a word), that con- 

 stitutes the essential principle of geography to-day. Mature, fully 

 developed geography therefore involves the study of physiography 

 and ontography in their mutual relations. Treated otherwise, the 

 divisions of the subject lose coherence; they fall apart and are 

 gathered up by various other sciences. It is only when they are 

 bound together by the element of relationship that they constitute 

 a reasonably connected body of study, as well unified a science as 

 any other. In support of this principle, let us turn aside to note — 

 as others have done — how largely the principle of relationship is 

 serviceable in classifying the sciences. 



5. Comparison of Geography with other Sciences. — All terrestrial 

 substances, inorganic and organic, the study of whose relationships 

 constitutes geography, are also the proper subject of study in relation 

 to composition by the chemist : rock, water, air and organisms are 

 all to be analyzed and classified as compounds. Again, all the 

 activities in the world of geography are the appropriate subject of 

 study in relation to energy by the physicist. Moreover, as fast as 

 geography, chemistry, physics and the other sciences advance, 

 their progress should be duly chronicled by the historian ; for it is 

 a sad mistake to imagine that the whole content* of history is only 

 the *' politics of the past." From the discovery of America by 

 Columbus to the discovery of a narrow flood-plain scroll on the 

 upper Susquehanna by an early backwoodsman ; from the migra- 

 tion of races across continents to the settlement of miller by a 

 waterfall, there is no discontinuity. The historian must regard all 

 such facts, great and small, as pertinent to his study of the sequence 



