800 hEPoiiT— 1900. 



Section E.— GEOGRAPHY. 

 President of the Section — Sir George S. Robertson, K.C.S.I, 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



When the British Association for the Advancement of Science honoured me with 

 an invitation to preside over this Section, I accepted the distinction, thoughtfully 

 and with sincere gratification. The selection as your President at Bradford, 

 this great and interesting centre of commercial energy, of a student of political 

 movements who was also deeply interested in the science of geography, seemed to 

 point suggestively to a particular branch of our subject as appropriate for an 

 opening address. This consideration, and, to my thinking, the fitness of the 

 occasion, led me to believe that the British Empire itself was a very proper 

 subject for such reflections as could be compressed within the limits of an in- 

 augural Presidential Address. Many of my predecessors have eloquently and 

 wisely dealt with various topics of admitted geographical rectitude — with 

 geography in its more strictly scientific study, with its nature and its purview, 

 with its recent progress, and with the all-important question of how it could 

 be best taught methodically, and how most profitably it might be studied. In 

 dealing with the important practical application of our science to the facts of 

 national life — Political geo.'raphy — I feel that perhaps a word of explanation 

 is necessary. Pure geography, with its placid aloofness and its far-stretching 

 outlook, combined sometimes with a too rigid devotion to the facts and con- 

 clusions of strict geographical research, is apt to incline many scientific minds 

 to an admirable quiet-eyed cosmopolitanism — the cosmopolitanism of the cloistered 

 college or the lecture tlieatre. It perhaps also at times has a tendency to create 

 in purely academic students a feeling of half disdain or of amicable irritability 

 against those who love the science for its political and social suggestiveness and 

 elucidations. Thus there is a possible danger that geographers of high intel- 

 lectual calibre, with enthusiasms entirely scholarly, may come to underrate 

 nationality and to look upon the world and mankind as the units, and upon 

 people and confederacies and amalgamations merely as specific instances of the 

 general type. We know that geography is often looked upon as the science 

 of foreign countries more especially. Such mental confusion is undoubtedly 

 less common than it was, yet it still influences, unconsciously, the minds of 

 many people. It is well not to forget this curious fact, and to point out, as 

 if it required emphasising, that there is nothing foreign to geographical thought 

 in the association of geography and patriotism, and that the home country is 

 ■worthy of careful study, particularly when, as with us, our home country is not 

 Yorkshire, nor England, nor the United Kingdom, but the whole British Empire. 

 That is my justification and my apology for taking Political Geography and the 



