GEOGRAPHY 



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GEOGRAPHY 



out. It is unnecessary to give in detail all the 

 results of that great era of exploration which 

 began in the latter part of the fifteenth cen- 

 tury. It is enough to say that the western 

 hemisphere was discovered the New World, 

 as people called it in those days ; that an all- 

 water route around the south of Africa to 

 India was discovered; and that the world was 

 circumnavigated the crowning achievement. 

 Once the continents were actually known, ex- 

 ploration of their interiors was begun, and the 

 outline of the American continent was put on 

 the map of the world. 



The Age of Exploration. There came a lull, 

 when nations seemed to think more of ac- 

 quiring territory and power than of acquiring 

 knowledge; and not until the late eighteenth 

 century did intense, driving curiosity waken 

 again. As the late fifteenth and the sixteenth 

 century constituted the age of discovery, so 

 did the nineteenth century constitute the age 

 of exploration. Not only in America but in 

 the more dangerous wilds of Africa, of Aus- 

 tralia and of Asia, this exploration went on, 

 and there cannot be a correct appreciation of 

 geography and of all that it tells without some 

 knowledge of how this has been gained. A 

 "dry study," children sometimes call it, and 

 yet, back of its facts and its accurately-drawn 

 maps there is the heroism of many men who 

 risked and, all too frequently, lost their lives 

 that the world might be made an open book 

 to all who choose to read. Boys and girls who 

 went to school in the middle of the nineteenth 

 century, for instance, had in their geographies 

 no such map of Africa as the textbooks of 

 to-day show. The outline was there, but every- 

 thing but the coastal region was left vague; 

 it was called the "dark continent." Where 

 were the sources of the great rivers that ran 

 to the sea? What sort of peoples lived on 

 their banks? Were there forests and moun- 

 tains, or flat prairies, in the interior? What 

 animals roamed these wilds? Nobody knew; 

 but to-day all this information in definite form 



is the property of every schoolboy, because 

 there was no lack of men who felt the romance 

 of geography. 



There were some discoveries, too, left for 

 the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries 

 discoveries in the far regions about the poles. 

 How explorers met the challenge of these ice- 

 bound lands and seas may be learned from 

 the article on POLAR EXPLORATION. 



The Change in Geography. It might seem 

 that, when the discoveries were made and 

 charted on the maps, when the descriptions 

 were written and the statistics were gathered, 

 the work of the geographer was done; but this 

 is not true. The gathering of such facts, ap- 

 parently unrelated for the most part, was the 

 main province of geography for centuries, but 

 the new geography concerns itself rather with 

 organizing these facts in accordance with cer- 

 tain governing principles in other words, the 

 new geography is a science in the true sense 

 of the word. The gathering of a multitude of 

 facts has shown that there are undoubtedly 

 fundamental laws upon which similarities and 

 variations rest, and the geographer exerts him- 

 self to find out these laws. 



It cannot be mere chance, for instance, that 

 all the world's greatest and most progressive 

 nations have grown up in the temperate zone. 

 Are the conditions which have resulted in 

 this unchangeable? Is it hopeless ever to 

 attempt to build up a civilization of the mod- 

 ern type in tropic countries where lavish nature 

 seems able to produce everything except en- 

 ergy, or to populate regions of excessive cold? 

 Can men go on for generation after generation 

 adapting themselves to geographic surround- 

 ings, and the surroundings to themselves, with- 

 out in time acquiring the characteristics of 

 the original inhabitants of the region? Many 

 and interesting are the problems related to 

 human life which the geographer is called upon 

 to solve, and it is the scientific point of view 

 from which such questions are studied that 

 distinguishes the new geography. J.R. 



Divisions of Geography 



So wide a subject as geography must of 

 necessity be broken up into various divisions, 

 and the most commonly accepted classification 

 divides it into mathematical geography, physi- 

 cal geography, and biogeography. This last 

 named division, of which the name at first ap- 

 pears somewhat difficult, is merely "life geog- 

 raphy," or political geography. 



Mathematical Geography. In a way, this 

 lies at the basis of all the other phases of 

 the subject. It treats of the shape of the earth 

 (which is not a simple sphere, but an irregular 

 spheroid, flattened at the poles, for want of a 

 better name called geoid), of its size and its 

 movements. At first thought it might seem 

 that this is a very abstract division of geog- 



