TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 701 



Pat in tlie fewest words, my opinion is that 



Geography is the science which deals ivith the forms of relief of the Eartlis crust, 

 and icith the influence ivhich these forms exercise on the distributioti of all other 

 phenomena. 



This definition looks to the form and composition of the Earth's crust itself, 

 and to the successive coverings, partial and complete, in which the stony glohe is 

 wrapped. We sometimes hear of the New Geography, but I think it is more pro- 

 fitable to consider the present position of Geography as the outcome of the thought 

 and labours of an unbroken chain of workers, continuously modified by the growth 

 of knowledge, yet old in aim, old even in the expression of many of the ideas that 

 we are apt to consider the most modern. 



Soine Historical Landmarks. 



Claudius PtoleniEBus, about loO a.d., gathered into his great ' Geography ' the 

 whole outcome of the Greek study of the habitable world. He laid stress on the 

 threefold nature of descriptions of the Earth's surface, the general sketch of the 

 great features of the world alone receiving the name of Geography, the more 

 special description of an area he termed Chorography- and the detailed account of 

 a particular place Topography. 



Aristotle, who first adduced real proofs of the sphericity of the Earth, had not 

 failed to note the relationships which exist between plants and animals, and the 

 places in which they are found, and he argued that the character of peoples was 

 influenced by the laud in which they lived ; but Ptolemy cared little for theories, 

 comparisons, or relationships, confining himself rather to the record of actual facts. 

 He made errors, the results of which were more important, as it happened, in ad- 

 vancing knowledge than were the truths which he recorded ; for after the troubled 

 mediaeval sleep, when even the spherical form of the Earth was blotted out of the 

 knowledge of Christendom, the scientific deductions made by Toscanelli from the 

 false premises of Ptolemy heartened Columbus for his westward voyage to tlie 

 Indies, on the very outset of which he stumbled all unknowing on the New World, 

 When Magellan succeeded in the enterprise which Columbus had commenced, the 

 fourteen centuries' reign of Ptolemy in geography- came to an end; his work was 

 done. 



The rapid unveiling of tlie Earth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cast 

 a glamour over feats of exploration which has not yet been wholly dissipated, and 

 it may not be easy, even now, to obtain wide credence for the fact that the ex- 

 plorer is usually but the collector of raw material for the geographer. 



It is of vital interest to trace the re-formation of the theory of geography after 

 its interruption in the Middle Ages. The fragments of the old Greek lore were 

 cemented together by new and plastic thoughts, crudely enough by Apian, Gemma 

 Frisius, and Sebastian Munster in the sixteenth century, but with increasing 

 strength and completeness by Cluverius, Carpenter, and Varenius in the seven- 

 teenth. 



The First Oxford Geographer. 



The names of Cluverius and Varenius are familiar to every historian of 

 geography, but that of Carpenter, I am afraid, is now brought to the notice of 

 many geographical students for the first time. He was not so great as Varenius, 

 but he was the first British geographer to write on theoretical geography as 

 distinguished from mathematical treatises on navigation or the repetition of nar- 

 ratives of travel, and I think that there is evidence to show that his work had an 

 influence on his great Dutch contemporary. 



Nathanael Carpenter, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, published his book in 

 162o under the title — 



' Geographic delineated forth in two Bookes. Containing the Sphericall and 

 Topical] parts thereof,' and with the motto from Ecclesiastes on its title-page — 



' One generation commetb, and another goeth, but the Earth remayneth for 

 ever.' 



