NATURE 



385 



THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1902. 



BRITISH GEOGRAPHY. 

 Britain and the British Seas. By H. J. Mackinder, 

 M.A., Reader in Geography in the University of 

 Oxford. Pp. xvi + 378. (London : WilUam Heine- 

 mann, 1902.) 



THIS important contribution to geojjraphical literature 

 is, we believe, the first effort to present a complete 

 geographical description of the British Isles in accord- 

 ance with modern views, complete, however, rather in 

 comprehensiveness of scope than in exhaustiveness of 

 detail. The work strikes us as literature -clothing in 

 dignified and continuous form the theories and con- 

 clusions of many workers — rather than science, which in 

 the existing state of geographical knowledge demands 

 more critical treatment of controversial matters and 

 more direct contact with original data. The author 

 excels in broad generalisations, and he has a happy 

 knack of setting essential facts in striking lights, so that 

 they are forced on the attention of the reader and remain 

 fixed in his memory It is impossible, of course, that 

 any one man could be an independent authority on 

 all the subjects which have to be dealt with in a geo- 

 graphical description ; but Mr. Mackinder has got up his 

 case so thoroughly that it is only by the smoother running 

 of his chariot wheels where he enters on the domain of 

 human, and especially of historical, affairs that we are 

 led to suspect which are his most familiar studies. 



A striking merit in the arrangement of the book, and 

 it is a great one, is that no doubt can arise as to its 

 purpose and plan. The development of the argument 

 is preceded by an openmg statement and clenched by a 

 formal array of numbered paragraphs setting forth what 

 is claimed as having been established. Unlike many 

 books which are geographical in intention, this one is 

 consistent throughout, tracing an unbroken chain of 

 causation from the earliest hypothesis as to the existence 

 of ancient land in the geological past to the latest fore- 

 cast of thought in the political future. The chain is not 

 equally strong in all its parts, and its extremities pass 

 into regions of gloom which some faith is required to 

 believe illumined. 



The first chapter treats of the position of the British 

 Islands (which we are glad to see gathered under the one 

 word Britain), showing how in classical times they were 

 at the end of the habitable world, with only, ocean and 

 ice beyond, while now they lie in the very centre. Mr. 

 Mackinder speaks of the ice drift in the East Greenland 

 current as " the physical boundary of medi;Lval Europe "; 

 yet there is some evidence to show that the western 

 voyages of the Norsemen met but slight obstruction 

 from the ice, and the vanished settlements of East 

 <}reenland point to a comparatively recent increase in the 

 severity of the climate. That the trade-winds blow over 

 the Sahara we should not like to affirm, though Mr. 

 Mackinder is doubtless correct in taking the southern 

 boundary of the medi;cval world of Europe as the 

 Trades and the desert. But when the reign of terror of 

 the half-known— cold and heat and the vacant spaces of 

 ocean— was shattered by the voyagers from Iberia, 

 Britain swung into the centre of the land hemisphere;— 

 NO. T687. VOL. 65] 



" Seen thus in relation to earlier and to later history, 

 Britain is possessed of two geographical qualities, com- 

 plementary rather than antagonistic : insularity and 

 universality." 



The nature of the insularity is investigated in a chapter 

 on the British seas, contrasting the Ocean with the 

 Narrow Seas towards Teutonic Europe and the Narrower 

 Seas towards France ; and the remarkable coincidence 

 that the narrowest channel, which separates Kent from 

 the continent, lies opposite the terminus of the great 

 Teutonic-Romance linguistic frontier of Europe is treated 

 with a masterly completeness. 



The movement of the waters, tidal and circulatory, 

 receives a chapter to itself, and then on p. 46 the 

 serious part of the book begins, and the general 

 reader will meet with his first check, for he must 

 enter on a hundred pages of fairly stiff geology. 

 This is not the geology of the text-books ; forma- 

 tions are scarcely referred to, and there is absolutely 

 nothing of paleontology. It is a restatement, and in 

 some particulars an extension, of the history of the rifted 

 crust-blocks of Suess and the system of coastal-plain 

 formation and river-development with which the name of 

 W. M. Davis is usually associated. The theories are 

 boldly and skilfully employed, and in their light the 

 bullumg of the British Isles stands forth with startling 

 clearness ; the author might have seen it all. We 

 question whether any geologist intimately acquainted with 

 the details and the infinite uncertainties of one depart- 

 ment of his science would have dared to compress the 

 history of the past into the few clear-cut episodes which 

 are here presented in a manner which wins our admira- 

 tion even if it fails to gain our entire confidence. We 

 may quote part of the author's summary, bearing in 

 mind -that a much fuller statement is given in the 

 pages :— 



". . . . The fringe of headlands along the west coast 

 of Scotland, and the lie of Glenmore and the Rift 

 Valley, betoken a south-westerly rock-graining, to be 

 interpreted as the wreck of a Caledonian mountain 

 range, which once crossed the site of the North Sea. 



" But the existing hills have not been shaped from the 

 Caledonian peaks by uninterrupted erosion. The general 

 equivalence of the higher summits, and the transverse, 

 southerly trend of the consequent valleys where they 

 breach the ridges, can only be explained by the inter- 

 polation of an epoch during which the mountains were 

 reduced to a basal plain. Thence followed a fresh cycle 

 of denudation when the plain was raised to a grained 

 plateau spreading back from the British Uplands towards 

 Iceland and Greenland. 



'• By what process the plateau of Atlantis collapsed 

 and the uplands of its south-eastward face were trans- 

 ferred to developing Europe, may be imagined from the 

 form of the ocean bed. Two abysmal pits, Atlantic and 

 Arctic, gradually encroached upon the land until they 

 merged across it, and the divide between them became 

 the submarine isthmus known as the Scoto- Icelandic 

 Rise. The southward belt of median uplands in Britain 

 — Highland, Central and Cambrian— is in prolongation 

 of this rise, and no doubt due to the same terrestrial 

 stresses. 



" Britain was differentiated from the rest of the slope 

 of Atlantis by the formation of proto-Britain in advance 

 of the Caledonian shore line. Against the resistance of 

 this salient block the Hercynian pressures crumpled the 

 strata into northward and westward folds, and these, 



S 



