568 AN-N"UAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTTTTTflON, 1913. 



the type of London and Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast, will always 

 be amongst the chief things to be reckoned with in these islands, 

 irrespective of local coal supply or accessory manufacturing indus- 

 tries, which may decay through exhaustion. 



I have attempted in what precedes to draw attention once more to 

 certain matters for which it seems strangely difficult to get a hearing. 

 What it amounts to is this, that as far as our information goes the 

 development of the steamship and the railway, and the universal in- 

 troduction of machinery which has arisen from it, have so increased 

 the demand made by man upon the earth's resources that in less than 

 a century they will have become fully taxed. When colonization 

 and settlement in a new country proceeded slowly and laboriously, 

 extending centrifugally from one or two favorable spots on the coast, 

 it took a matter of four centuries to open up a region the size of 

 England. Nom^ we do as much for a continent like North America in 

 about as many decades. In the first case it was not worth troubling 

 about the exhaustion of resources, for they were scarcely more than 

 touched, and even if they were exhausted there were other whole 

 continents to conquer. But now, so far as our information goes, we 

 are already making serious inroads upon the resources of the whole 

 earth. One has no desire to sound an unduly alarmist note, or to sug- 

 gest that we are in imminent danger of starvation, but surely it 

 would be well, even on the suspicion, to see if our information is 

 adequate and reliable and if our conclusions are correct; and not 

 merely to drift in a manner which was justifiable enough in Saxon 

 times, but which, at the rate things are going now, may land us 

 unexpectedly in difficulties of appalling magnitude. 



What is wanted is that we should seriously address ourselves to a 

 stock taking of our resources. A beginning has been made with a 

 great map on the scale of one to a million, but that is not sufficient; 

 we should vigorously proceed with the collection and discussion of 

 geographical data of all kinds, so that the major natural distribu- 

 tions shall be adequately Imown, and not merely those parts which 

 commend themselves, for one reason or another, to special national 

 or private entei-prises. The method of Government survey em- 

 ployed in most civilized countries for the construction of maps, the 

 examination of geological structure, or the observation of weather 

 and climate is satisfactory as far as it goes, but it should go further 

 and be made to include such things as vegetation, water supply, 

 supplies of energy of all kinds, and, what is quite as important, the 

 bearings of one element upon others under different conditions. 

 Much, if not most, of the work of collecting data would naturally 

 be done as it is now by experts in the special branches of knowledge, 

 but it is essential that there should be a definite plan of a geographical 

 survey as a whole, in order that the regional or distributional aspect 



