GEOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION' 



IN the quaint preface to his Navigations and Voyages 

 of the English Nation, Hakluyt calls geography and chro- 

 nology " the sunne and moone, the right eye and the left 

 of all history." The position thus claimed for geography 

 three hundred years ago by the great English chronicler was 

 not accorded by his successors, and has hardly been admitted 

 even now. The functions of the geographer and the travel- 

 ler, popularly assumed to be identical, have been supposed 

 to consist in descriptions of foreign countries, their climate, 

 productions, and inhabitants, bristling on the one hand with 

 dry statistics, and relieved on the other by as copious an 

 introduction as may be of stirring adventure and per- 

 sonal anecdote. There has indeed been much to justify this 

 popular assumption. It was not until the key-note of its 

 future progress was struck by Karl Ritter within the present 

 century that geography advanced beyond the domain of 

 travellers' tales and desultory observation into that of 

 orderly, methodical, scientific progress. This branch of 

 inquiry, however, is now no longer the pursuit of mere 

 numerical statistics, nor the chronicle of marvellous and 

 often questionable adventures by flood and fell. It seeks 

 to present a luminous picture of the earth's surface, its 

 various forms of configuration, its continents, islands, and 

 oceans, its mountains, valleys, and plains, its rivers and 

 lakes, its climates, plants and animals. It thus endeavours 

 to produce a picture which shall not be one of mere topo* 

 graphical detail. It ever looks for a connection between 

 scattered facts, tries to ascertain the relations which subsist 

 between the different parts of the globe, their reactions 

 on each other and the function of each in the general econ- 



1 A Lecture delivered at the Evening Meeting of the Royal Geographic;! 

 Society, 24th March, 1879. 



339 



