516 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1916. 



and with the results of this inquiry they again approached the 

 universities, this time happily with success. Schools of geography 

 were established at Oxford and Cambridge, and in time lectureships 

 in the subject were instituted at the Universities of Edinburgh and 

 Glasgow, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Reading, 

 Sheffield, Aberystwyth. It was just before this that the Manchester 

 Geographical Society was formed, and a week or two later the Royal 

 Scottish Geographical Society, with branches in Glasgow, Dundee, 

 and Aberdeen, followed at intervals by similar societies in Liver- 

 pool, Newcastle, Leeds, Southampton. Thus geography was raised 

 to an altogether different platform in this country from the lowly 

 position she had previously occupied, she Avas placed on a level 

 with the subject in Germany, though that pushful country had 

 the start of us by many years, as she has had in other directions, 

 and a long leeway has to be covered. But we have been making 

 headway. Apart from the purely educational work carried out by 

 the universities, a beginning has been made in the work of geographi- 

 cal research. Both at Oxford and Cambridge, at the London School 

 of Economics, and I believe at Edinburgh and Glasgow work of this 

 kind is encouraged. On the university programs we have such 

 heads as the principles of geography; survey of the natural regions 

 of the globe; land forms and the morphology of the continents; 

 meteorology, climatology, and oceanography; human geography in 

 its various phases ; geographical methods of notations, and so on. To 

 the university tutor, the schoolmaster, the textbook compiler of 30 

 years ago, most of this would have been an unlmown tongue. Ex- 

 amples of what may be regarded as geographical research work have 

 been forthcoming from trained men like Mill, Mackinder, Chisholm, 

 George Adam Smith, Herbertson, Grant Ogilvie, Roxby, Miss Newbi- 

 gin, and others on this side, and by Davis, Huntington, Miss Semple, 

 Brigham, and others in the States, which may be said to have been 

 inspired from the mother country. Much good work has been done 

 by the various students in the geographical distribution of vegeta- 

 tion in this country. As samples of scientific exploring work I might 

 refer to Sir John Murray's investigations of the Scottish lochs ; Mill's 

 survey of a region in Sussex; Giinther's researches on the Italian 

 coast line ; Hogarth, Ramsay, and others in the Near East ; Willcocks 

 in Mesopotamia ; Filippi, Stein, Carruthers, and Huntington in cen- 

 tral Asia; Hamilton Rice in South America; Scott, Shackleton, 

 Bruce, and Mawson in the Antarctic. All this is a good beginning, 

 and there is every reason to hope for still further work of this kind 

 in the future, if those responsible for geography at our universities 

 will do their duty. 



You still find some scientific men in England who deny that geog- 

 raphy is a science or can ever be a science, because for one thing it 



