September io, 1914J 



NATURE 



45 



They will be there and will be shown on the map, but 

 to all human intents and purposes the geography will 

 be changed. The sea will no longer be a barrier, it 

 will no longer be the only high-road from England to 

 France. There will be going to and fro on or in dr)' 

 land, and going to and fro neither on land nor on sea. 

 Suppose this science of aviation to make great strides, 

 and heavy loads to be carried in the air, what will 

 become of the ports, and what will become of sea- 

 going peoples? The ports will be there, appearing as 

 now on the map, but Birmingham goods will be 

 shipped at Birmingham for foreign parts, and Lithgow 

 will export mineral direct, saying good-bye to the Blue 

 Mountains and even to Sydney Harbour. 



Now, in saying this I may well be told by my 

 scientific colleagues that it is all very well as a pretty 

 piece of fooling, but that it is not business. I say it 

 as an unscientific man with a profound belief in the 

 limitless possibilities of science. How long is it since 

 it was an axiom that, as a lump of iron sinks in water, 

 a ship made of iron could not possibly float? Is it 

 fatuous to contemplate that the conquest of the air, 

 which is now beginning, will make it a highway for 

 commercial purposes? We have aeroplanes alreadv 

 which settle on the water and rise again ; we are fol- 

 lowing on the track of the gulls which we wonder at 

 far away in the limitless waste of ocean. A century 

 and a half ago the great Edmund Burke ridiculed the 

 idea of representatives of the old North American 

 colonies sitting in the Imperial Parliament ; he spoke 

 of any such scheme as fighting with Nature and con- 

 quering the order of Providence ; he took the distance, 

 the time which would be involved — six weeks from the 

 present United States to London. If anyone had told 

 him that what is hapoening now through the applied 

 forces of science might happen, he would have called 

 him a madman. Men think in years, or at most in 

 lifetimes ; they ought sometimes to think in centuries. 

 I believe in Reclus's words, "All man has 

 hitherto done is a trifle in comparison with what he 

 will be able to eff^ect in future." Science is like a 

 woman. She says No again and again, but means 

 Yes in the end. 



In dealing with land and water I have touched upon 

 natural divisions and natural boundaries, which are 

 one of the provinces of geography. Flying gives the 

 go-by to all natural divisions and boundaries, even the 

 sea ; but let us come down to the earth. Isthmuses 

 are natural divisions between seas ; the ship canals cut 

 them and link the seas — the canal through the Isthmus 

 of Corinth, the canal which cuts the Isthmus of Pere- 

 kop between the Crimea and the mainland of Russia, 

 the Baltic Canal, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal. 

 The Suez Canal, it will be noted, though not such a 

 wonderful feat as the Panama Canal, is more import- 

 ant from a geographical point of view, in that an 

 open cut has been made from sea to sea without 

 necessity for locks, which surmount the land barrier 

 but more or less leave it standing. Inland, what are 

 natural divisions? Mountains, forests, deserts, and, 

 to some extent, rivers. Take mountains. " High, 

 massive mountain systems," writes Miss Semple, 

 "present the most effective barriers which man meets 

 on the land surface of the earth." But are the Rocky 

 Mountains, for instance, boundaries, dividing-lines, to 

 anything like the extent that they were now that rail- 

 ways go through and over them, carrying hundreds 

 of human beings back and fore day by day? On 

 what terms did British Columbia join the Dominion 

 of Canada? That the natural barrier between them 

 should be pierced by the railway. Take the Alps. 

 The canton Ticino, running down to Lake Maggiore, 

 is politicallv in Switzerland ; it is wholly on the 

 southern <;iHp of the Alps. Is not the position entirely 



NO. 2341, VOL. 94] 



changed by the St. Gothard tunnel, running from 

 Swiss territor}' into Swiss territorj- on either side of 

 the mountains? 



If, in the Bible language, it requires faith to remove 

 mountains, it is not wholly so with other natural 

 boundaries. Forests were, in old days, verj* real 

 natural dividing-lines. They were so in England, as 

 in our own day they have been in Central Africa. 

 Between forty and fifty years ago, in his " Historical 

 Maps of England," Prot. C. H. Pearson, whose 

 name is well known and honoured in Australia, laid 

 down that England was settled from east and west, 

 because over against Gaul were hea\'y woods, greater 

 barriers than the sea. Kent was cut off from Central 

 England by the Andred Weald, said to have been, in 

 King Alfred's time, 120 miles long and 30 broad. 

 Here are Prof. Pearson's words: "The axe of 

 the woodman clearing away the forests, the labour of 

 nameless generations reclaiming the fringes of the 

 fens or making their islands habitable, have gradually 

 transformed England into one country, inhabited by 

 one people. But the early influences of the woods 

 and fens are to isolate and divide." Thus the cutting 

 down of trees is sometimes a good, not an evil, and 

 there are some natural boundaries which man can 

 wholly obliterate. 



Can the same be said of deserts? They can cer- 

 tainly be pierced, like isthmuses and like mountains. 

 The Australian desert is a natural division between 

 Western and South Australia. The desert will be 

 there, at any rate for many a long day after the 

 transcontinental railway has been finished, but will it 

 be, in anything like the same sense as before, a barrier 

 placed by Nature and respected by man? Nor do rail- 

 ways end with simply giving continuous communica- 

 tion, except when they are in tunnels. As we all 

 know, if population is available, they bring in their 

 train development of the land through which they 

 pass. Are these deserts of the earth always going to 

 remain "deserts idle"? Is man going to obliterate 

 them? In the days to come, will the desert rejoice 

 and blossom as the rose? What will dry farming 

 and what will afforestation have to say? In the evi- 

 dence taken in Australia by the Dominions Royal 

 Commission, the Commissioner for Irrigation in New 

 South Wales tells us that " the dr\' farming areas are 

 carried out westward into what are regarded as arid 

 lands every year," and that, in his opinion, "we are 

 merely on the fringe of dry farming " in Australia. 

 A book has lately been published entitled " The Con- 

 quest of the Desert." The writer. Dr. Macdonald, 

 deals with the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, which 

 he knows well, and for the conquest of the desert he 

 lays down that three things are essential — population, 

 conservation, and afforestation. He points out in 

 words which might have been embodied in Mr. 

 Marsh's book, how the desert zone has advanced 

 through the reckless cutting of trees, and how it can 

 be flung back again by tree barriers to the sand dunes. 

 By conservation he means the system of dry farming 

 so successful in the United States of America, which 

 preserves the moisture in the soil and makes the desert 

 produce fine crops of durum wheat without a drop of 

 rain falling upon it from seedtime to har\'est, and he 

 addresses his book " to the million settlers of to- 

 morrow upon the dry and desert lands of South 

 Africa." If the settlers come, he holds that the 

 agency of man, tree-planting, ploughing and harrow- 

 ing the soil, will drive back and kill out the desert. 

 The effect of tree-planting in arresting the sand dunes 

 and reclaiming desert has been very marked in the 

 Landes of Gascony. Here, I gather from Mr. Perkins* 

 report, are some 3600 square miles of sandy waste, 

 more than half of which had, so far back as 1882,. 



