654 GEOGRAPHY 



years. The views I hold may not be representative of European, 

 perhaps not even of British, geographical opinion, except in so far as 

 they are the result of assimilating, more or less consciously, the writ- 

 ings and teachings of geographical leaders in all countries, retaining 

 congenial factors, and modifying or rejecting those which were foreign 

 to the workings of my own partially instructed mind. 



The history of every branch of science teaches that time works 

 changes in the nature and the value of the problems of the hour. In 

 successive ages the waves of existing knowledge make inroads upon 

 the shores of ignorance at different points. For one generation they 

 seem to have been setting, with all their force, against some one se- 

 lected point ; in the next they are encroaching elsewhere, the former 

 problem left, it may be, imperfectly solved; but gradually the area 

 of the unknown is being reduced on every side, however irregularly. 



In the beginning of geography, the problem before all others was 

 the figure of the Earth. Scientific progress, not in geography alone, but 

 in all science, depended on the discovery of the truth as to form. No 

 sooner was the sphericity of the Earth established than two fresh pro- 

 blems sprang to the front, neither of them new, for both existed from 

 the first, the fixing of position and the measurement of the size of 

 the Earth. Geography, and science as a whole, progressed by the fail- 

 ures, as well as by the successes, of the pioneers who struggled for cen- 

 turies with these problems. Latitude was a simple matter, theoretic- 

 ally no problem at all, but a direct deduction from the Earth's form, 

 though its determination was practically delayed by difficulties of a 

 mechanical kind. The problem of the longitude was far more serious, 

 and bulks largely in the history of science. Pending their solution, the 

 estimates of size were rough guesses; had these been more accurate, it 

 is doubtful if Columbus could have persuaded any sane sailor to 

 accompany him on his westward voyage to India, the coast of which 

 he was not surprised to find so near to Spain as the Caribbean Sea. 



After latitude could be fixed to a nicety, and longitude worked out 

 in certain circumstances with nearly equal accuracy, the size of the 

 Earth was determined within a small limit of error, and the problem of 

 geography shifted to detailed discovery. This phase lasted so long that 

 even now it hardly excites surprise to see an article, or to open a vol- 

 ume, on the history of geography, which turns out to be a narrative 

 of the progress of discovery. Perhaps British geographers, more than 

 others, were prone to this error, and for a time the country foremost 

 in modern discovery ran some risk of falling to the rear in real geo- 

 graphy. 



It is not so paradoxical as it seems to say that the chief problem of 

 geography at present is the definition of geography. Some learned 

 men have said within living memory, and many have thought, that 

 geography is not a science at all, that it is without unity, without a 



