15) 
NATURE 
[OcToOBER 2, 1913 
make the difficulty greater as land becomes more 
valuable. Cow’s milk, which in modern times has 
become a ‘‘necessary of life’”’ in most parts of the 
civilised world, is in much the same category as 
meat, except that difficulties of preservation, and 
therefore of transport, are even greater. That the 
problem has not become acute is largely due to the 
growth of the long-transport system available for 
wheat, which has enabled land round the great centres 
of population to be devoted to dairy produce, If we 
are right in supposing that this state of things cannot 
be permanent, the difficulty of milk supply must 
increase, although relieved somewhat by the less 
intense concentration in the towns; unless, as seems 
not unlikely, a wholly successful method of permanent 
preservation is devised. 
In determining the positions of the main centres, 
or rather, in subdividing the larger areas for the dis- 
tribution of towns with their supporting and dependent 
districts, water supply must be one of the chief factors 
in the future, as it has been in the past; and in the 
case of industrial centres the quality as well as the 
quantity of water has to be considered. A funda- 
mental division here would probably be into districts 
having a natural local supply, probably of hard water, 
and districts in which the supply must be obtained 
from a distance. In the latter case engineering works 
of great magnitude must often be involved, and the 
question of total resources available in one district 
for the supply of another must be much more fully 
investigated than it has been. In many cases, as in 
this country, the protection of such resources pending 
investigation is already much needed. It is worth 
noting that the question may often be closely related 
to the development and transmission cf electrical 
energy from waterfalls, and the two problems might 
in such cases be dealt with together. Much may be 
learned about the relation of water supply to dis- 
tribution of population from a study of history, and a 
more active prosecution of combined historical and 
geographical research would, I believe, furnish useful 
material in this connection, besides throwing interest- 
ing light on many historical questions. 
Continued exchange of the ‘ north-and-south” type 
and at least a part of that described as ‘‘east-and- 
west’? gives permanence to a certain number of 
points where, so far as can be seen, there must 
always be a change in the mode of transport. It is 
not likely that we shall have heavy freight-carrying 
monsters in the air for a long time to come, and 
until we have the aérial ‘‘tramp’’ transport must be 
effected on the surfaces of land and sea. However 
much we may improve and cheapen land transport, it 
cannot in the nature of things become as cheap as 
transport by sea. For on land the essential idea is 
always that of a prepared road of some kind, and, as 
Chisholm has pointed out, no road can carry more 
than a certain amount; traffic beyond a certain quantity 
constantly requires the construction of new roads. It 
follows, then, that no device is likely to provide trans- 
port indifferently over land and sea, and the seaport 
has in consequence inherent elements of permanence. 
Improved and cheapened land transport increases the 
economy arising from the employment of large ships 
rather than small ones, for not only does transport 
inland become relatively more important, but dis- 
tribution along a coast from one large seaport becomes 
as easy as from a number of small coastal towns. 
Hence the conditions are in favour of the growth of 
a comparatively small number of immense seaport 
cities like~ London and New York, in which there 
must be great concentration not merely of work 
directly connected with shipping, but_of commercial 
and financial interests of all sorts. The seaport is, 
NO. 2292, VOL. 92] 
in fact, the type of great city which seems likely to 
increase continually in size, and provision for its needs 
cannot in general be made from the region imme- 
diately surrounding it, as in the case of towns of 
other kinds. In special cases there is also, no doubt, 
permanent need of large inland centres of the type 
of the ‘railway creation,” but under severe geographic 
control these must depend very much on the nature 
and efficiency of the systems of land transport. It is 
not too much to say (for we possess some evidence of 
it already) that the number otf distinct geographical 
causes which give rise to the establishment and main- 
tenance of individual great cities is steadily diminish- 
ing, but that the large seaport is a permanent and 
increasing necessity. It follows that aggregations of 
the type of London and Liverpool, Glasgow and Bel- 
fast will always be amongst the chief things to be 
reckoned with in these islands, irrespective of local 
coal supply or accessory manufacturing industries, 
which may decay through exhaustion. 
I have attempted in what precedes to direct atten- 
tion once more to certain matters for which it seems 
strangely difficult to get a hearing. What it amounts 
to is this, that as far as our information goes the 
development of the steamship and the railway, and 
the universal introduction of machinery which has 
arisen from it, have so increased the demand made 
by man upon the earth’s resources that in less than 
a century they will have become fully taxed. When 
colonisation and settlement in a new country pro- 
ceeded slowly and laboriously, extending centrifugally 
from one or two favourable spots on the coast, it 
took a matter of four centuries to open up a region 
the size of England. Now we do as much for a 
continent like North America in about as many 
decades. In the first case it was not worth troubling 
about the exhaustion of resources, for they were 
scarcely more than touched, and even if they were 
exhausted there were other whole continents to con- 
quer. But now, so far as our information goes, we 
are already making serious inroads upon the resources 
of the whole earth. One has no desire to sound an 
unduly alarmist note, or to suggest that we are in 
imminent danger of starvation, but surely it would 
be well, even on the suspicion, to see if our informa- 
tion is adequate and trustworthy and if our conclusions 
are correct; and not merely to drift in a manner which 
was justifiable enough in Saxon times, but which, 
at the rate things are going now, may land us un- 
expectedly in difficulties of appalling magnitude. 
What is wanted is that we should seriously address 
ourselves to a stocktaking of our resources. A be- 
ginning has been made with a great map on the 
scale of one to a million, but that is not sufficient; 
we should vigorously proceed with the collection and 
discussion of geographical data of all kinds, so that 
the major natural distributions shall be adequately 
known, and not merely those parts which commend 
themselves, for one reason or another, to special 
national or private enterprises. The method of 
Government survey, employed in most civilised 
countries for the construction of maps, the examina- 
tion of geological structure or the observation of 
weather and climate, is satisfactory as far as it goes, 
but it should go further, and be made to include such 
things as vegetation, water supply, supplies of energy 
of all kinds, and, what is quite as important, the 
bearings of one element upon others under different 
conditions. Much, if not most, of the work of col- 
lecting data would naturally be done as it is now by 
experts in the special branches of knowledge, but it 
is essential that there should be a definite plan of 
a geographical survey as a whole, in order that the 
regional or distributional aspect should never be lost 
