NEW SCHOOL OF GEOGRAPHEES. 7 



or altogether deserted, and exposed to all the destructive forces 

 which act with such energy on the surface of the earth when it 

 is deprived of those protections by which nature originally 

 guarded it, and for wliich, in well-ordered husbandry, Imman 

 ingenuity has contrived more or less efficient substitutes.* Sim- 

 ilar abuses have tended to perpetuate and extend these evils in 

 later ages, and it is but recently that, even in the most populous 

 parts of Europe, public attention has been half awakened to the 

 necessity of restoring the disturbed harmonies of nature, whose 

 well-balanced influences are so propitious to all her organic off- 

 spring, and of repaying to our great mother the debt which the 

 prodigality and the thriftlessness of former generations have im- 

 posed upon their successors — thus fullilhng the command of re- 

 ligion and of practical wisdom, to use this world as not abusing it. 



New School of Geographers. 



The labors of Humboldt, of Ritter, of Guyot and their follow- 

 ers, have given to the science of Geography a more philosophical, 

 and, at the same time, a more imaginative character than it had 

 received from the hands of their predecessors. Perhaps the most 

 interesting field of speculation, thrown open by the new school to 

 the cultivators of this attractive study, is the inquiry : how far 

 external physical conditions, especially the configuration of the 

 earth's surface, and the distribution, outHne and relative position 

 of land and water, have influenced the social life and social prog- 

 ress of man. 



The revolutions of the seasons, with their alterations of tem- 

 perature and of length of day and night, the climates of different 

 zones, and the general conditions and movements of the atmos- 



* The temporary depopulation of an exhausted soil may be, in some cases, 

 a physical, though, like fallows in agriculture, a dear-bought advantage. 

 Under favorable circumstances, the "withdrawal of man and his flocks allows 

 the earth to clothe itself again with forests, and in a few generations to recover 

 its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, worn-out fields were depop- 

 ulated, in many parts of the Continent, by civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies 

 which insisted on the surrender of the half of a loaf already too small to sus- 

 tain its producer. Thus abandoned, these lands often relapsed into the forest 

 state, and, some centuries later, were again brought under cultivation with 

 renovated fertility. 



