I20 



NATURE 



[September 22, 1921 



been set up at Rothamsted and elsewhere, and we 

 are hoping- to achieve good results ; much valu- 

 able information has already been obtained. 



(3) ^^^ ^^^ ^1^0 looking to the tractor to 

 achieve great things on the farm. It will allow 

 considerable development of cultivation imple- 

 ments, enable us to improve our tillage and to 

 keep down weeds, a very serious trouble in the 

 southern part of England. Good Scottish farmers 

 in that region have told me that farming in Scot- 

 land is much easier than in England, because the 

 rigorous northern winters keep weeds in check, 

 while the mild southern winters encourage their 

 growth. * 



(4) It is possible that certain substances, such 

 as boric acid, the fluorides, etc., studied by Gautier 

 and Claussmann in France, may help in raising 

 crop growth. 



{5) It is possible also that special methods may 



prove of value, such as the high-tension discharge 

 tested by Miss Dudgeon at Lincluden, Dumfries,, 

 and ably and critically studied by Prof. \'. H. 

 Blackman. 



(6) Finally, it seems probable that some wholly 

 new method may be found for increasing crop 

 growth. In most civilised countries there are now 

 research institutes where the ways of plants and 

 the properties of soils are being studied. Men of 

 science, as a rule, do not care to risk prophecies 

 or to attempt to create sensations, and I certainly 

 am not going to break this wholesome rule. 

 Something, however, has already been done ; in 

 spite of the decreased labour spent on cultivation, 

 the yields tend to go up, while the new knowledge 

 that is now being gained is adding greatly to the 

 pleasure of farming and giving both masters and 

 men an interest in their work that they never had 

 before. 



By D. 



Applied Geography.^ 



G. Hogarth, M.A., D.Litt., C.M.G. 



THE term " applied geography " has been in 

 use for some years as a general designation 

 of lendings or borrowings of geographical results, 

 whether by a geographer who applies the material 

 of his own science to another, or by a geologist 

 or a meteorologist, or again an ethnologist or 

 historian, who borrows of the geographer. 

 Whether geography makes the loan of her own 

 motion or not, the interest in view, as it seems to 

 me, is primarily that, not of geography, but of 

 another science or study. 



Such applications are of the highest interest and 

 value as studies, and, still more, as means of edu- 

 cation. As studies, not merely are they links 

 between sciences, but they tend to become new 

 subjects of research, and to develop with time into 

 independent sciences. As means of education 

 they are used more generally, and prove them- 

 selves of higher potency than the pure sciences 

 from which or to which, respectively, the loans 

 are effected. But, in my view, geography, thus 

 applied, passes, in the process of application, into 

 a foreign province and under another control. It 

 is most proper, as well as most profitable, for a 

 geographer to work in that foreign field ; but, 

 while he stays in it, he is, in military parlance, 

 seconded. 



Logical as this view appears, to me, and often 

 as, in fact, it has been stated or implied by others 

 (for example, by one at least of my predecessors 

 in this chair, Sir Charles Close, who delivered his 

 presidential address to the section at the Ports- 

 mouth meeting in 191 1), it does not square with 

 some conceptions of geography put forward by 

 high authorities of recent years. These represent 

 differently the status of some of the studies, into 

 which, as I maintain, geography enters as a 

 secondary element. In particular, there is a 



1 Abrideed from the presidential addres* delivered to Section E (Geo- 

 graphy) of the British Association at Edinburgh on September 8. 



VOL. io8] 



school, represented in this country and more 

 strongly in America, which claims for geography 

 what, in my view, is an historical or ethnological 

 or even psychological study, using geographical 

 data towards the solution of problems in its own 

 field ; and some even consider this not merely a 

 function of true geography, but its principal func- 

 tion now and for the future. Their "new geo- 

 graphy " is and is to be the study of " human 

 response to land-forms." This is an extreme 

 American statement ; but the same idea is instinct 

 in such utterances, more sober and guarded, as 

 that of a great geographer. Dr. H. R. Mill, to the 

 effect that the tultimate problem of geography is 

 "the demonstrative and quantitative proof of the 

 control exercised by the earth's crust on the mental 

 processes of its inhabitants." Dr. Mill is too pro- 

 found a man of science not to guard himself, by 

 that saving word " ultimate," from such retorts 

 as Prof. Ellsworth Huntington, of Yale, has 

 offered to the extreme American statement. If, 

 the latter argued, geography is actually the study 

 of the human response to land-forms, then, as a 

 science, it is in its infancy, or, rather, it has 

 returned to a second childhood ; for it has scarcely 

 begun to collect exact data to this particular end, 

 or to treat them statistically, or to apply to them 

 the methods of isolation that exact science 

 demands, In this country geographers are less 

 inclined to interpret " new geography " on such 

 revolutionary lines ; but one suspects a tendency 

 towards the American view in both their principles 

 and their practice — in their choice of lines of 

 inquiry or' research and their choice of subjects 

 for education. The concentration on man, which 

 characterises geographical teaching in the Uni- 

 versity of London, and the almost exclusive atten- 

 tion paid to economic geography in the geographi- 

 cal curricula of some other British universities 

 tend in that direction. 



NO. 2708, 



