THE MIGRATIONS OF THE RACES OF MEN CONSIDERED 



HISTORICALLY.* 



Bv Prof. James Bryce. 



There are two senses in which we may claim for geograjihy that it is a 

 meeting point of the sciences. > All the departments of research which 

 deal with external nature touch one another in and through it — geology, 

 botany, zoology, meteorology, as well as, though less directly, the various 

 branches of physics. There is no one of these whose data are not, to a 

 greater or less extent, also within the province of geography; none 

 whose conclusions have not a material bearing on geographical prob- 

 lems; and geography is also the point of contact between the sciences 

 of Nature, taken all together, and the branches of inquiry which deal 

 with man and his institutions. Ceography gathers up the results which 

 tbe geologist, the botanist, the zoologist, and the meteorologist have 

 obtained, and presents them to the student of history, of economics, of 

 politics — we might, perhaps, add of law, of philology, and of architec- 

 ture — as an imi)ortant part of the data from which he must start, and 

 of the materials to which he will have to refer at many points in the 

 progress of his researches. It is with this second point of contact, this 

 aspect of geography as the basis for history, that we are to occupy our- 

 selves to-night. Understanding that the Scottish Geographical Society 

 desires not merely to present a current history of discovery, but to 

 bring into prominence the economic, social, and political aspects of the 

 science, and to inculcate its significance for those who devote them- 

 selves to the presently urgent i)roblems which civilized man is called to 

 deal with, I have chosen, as not unsuitable to an inaugural address, a 

 subject which belongs almost eciually to physical and descriptive geog- 

 raphy on the one side, to history and economics on the other. The 

 movements of the races and tribes of mankind over the surface of our 

 planet are in the first instance determined mainly by the pbysical con- 

 ditions of its surface and its atmospbere, but tliey become themselves 

 a part, and, indeed, a great part, of history; they create nations and 

 build up states; they determine the extension of languages and laws; 



* Read at the inaugural meeting of the London hranch of tlie Royal Scottish Geo- 

 graphical Society, April, 1892. {The ScoUinh Geographical Magazine, August, 1892; 

 vol. viii, pp. 400-421.) 



567 



