156 PRESIDENT S ADDRESS — SECTION E. 



Referring to school geography Professor Mackinder, the great 

 British authority, states* that " when teaching geography in 

 schools we seek to train pupils to' imagine accurately the inter- 

 action of human activities and their topographical conditioins. As 

 these conditions have been established partly by natural forces and 

 partly by human effort, any discussion of the correlation of various 

 conditions must be both scientific and humanistic. The mind of 

 the citizen must have a topographical background if he is to keep 

 order in the mass of information which he accumulates in the 

 course of his life, and in these days that background must extend 

 over the whole world. Besides giving this necessary mental equip- 

 ment, we believe that the collection, estimation, and correlation of 

 geographical facts afford a most valuable training in practical 

 judgment as applied to' ordinary affairs." 



I am afraid we have not progressed so far in the teaching of 

 geography in Australia. Put the new aspect ol geography has 

 been realized in part in school curricula, particularly in the States 

 of New South Wales and Victoria. 



The old-fashioned text-books of geography have been likened to 

 a Baedeker of the earth, or, as Dr. Rudmose Brown has put it,+ 

 " Catalogues of uncorrelated facts." Even the best text-books, 

 before the year 1890, were a mere succession O'f disjointed chapters 

 dealing with isolated subjects. 



Since then a new science of geography has grown up. From 

 being purely descriptive and a bald statement of fact in its earlier 

 stages, it has now developed into an analytical science supplying 

 data for synthetic conclusions of far-reaching in;iportance to the 

 human race. 



There is still some difference of opinion as to' the exact range 

 in scientific inquiry that properly is included under the texm 

 geography. Of the two extreme schools,! one leans heavily on the 

 side of geomcrphologv including cartography ; the other is rather 

 too fully imbued with belief that man is all that counts in a 

 description of the earth. This latter has been pressed sO' far by 

 some enthusiasts that thei original application of the term 

 geography has been lost sight of, and we are told that the study of 

 physical relief and map making are not geography but mere tools 

 of the geographer. Rather are they, together with climatology and 

 oceanography, tO' be regarded as the' elements of geography. " The 

 distribution of vegetable and animal life on the earth, including 

 man, is consequential, and being of supreme interest to man and 

 involved in the operation of diverse controls, it naturally consti- 

 tutes the advanced phase of geographical study. 



* Oeoffraphieal Teacher. 1917. 



t " The Province of the Geographer." Scot. Geoq. Mag., Vol. 30 (1914), p. 467. 



I G. G. Chisholm says, in Scot. Qeog. Mag. XXIV., p. 565: — "The chief difference 

 between the rival schools of geographers arises from this, that some have insisted on 

 taking man as determining the supreme aim of geographic studies .... whilst 



others have sought to bring into independent prominence the study of the forms and 

 physical conditions -of the earth's surface." 



