TRANSACTIONS OK SECTION E. 70'3 



and motion witli the celestial appearances, &c. I3y some it is taken in too 

 limited a sense, lor a Ijare description of the several countries ; and by others too 

 extensively, who along' with such a description would have their political 

 constitution.' 



Varenius produced a framework of Physical Geop:raphy capable of includiuj^ 

 new facts of discovery as they arose, and it is no wonder that his work, although 

 but a part, ruled unchallenged as the standard text-book of pure geography for 

 more than a century, lie laid stress on the causes and eft'ects of plienomena as 

 well as the mere fact of their occurrence, and be clearly recognised the vast 

 importance upon diflerent distributions of the vertical relief of the land. He did 

 not treat of human relations in geography, but, under protest, gave a scheme for 

 discussing them as a concession to popular demands. 



Kant. 



As Isaac Newton, the mathematician, bad turned bis attention to geography at 

 Cambridge in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, ao Immanuel Kant, the 

 philosopher, lectured on the same subject at Ivonigsberg in the later part. The 

 fame of Kant as a metaphysician has defrauded him of much of the honour that 

 is his due as a man of science. As Professor Hastie puts it: 'His earlier 

 scientific work, like an inner planet merged in light, was thus almost entirely lost 

 sight of in the blaze of his later philosophical splendour.' 



Kant, it will be remembered, considered that the communication of experience 

 from one person to another fell into two categories, the historical and the 

 geographical : that is to say, descriptions in order of time or in order of space. 

 The science of geography he considered to be fundamentally physical, but physical 

 geography formed the introduction and key to all other possible geographies, of 

 which he enumerated live : viathematical, concerned with the form, size, and 

 movements of the Earth and its place in the solar system ; moral, taking account 

 of the customs and characters of mankind according to their physical surroundings ; 

 political, concerning the divisions of the land into the territories of organised 

 governments ; tnercantile, or, as we now call it, commercial geography ; and 

 theological, which took account of the distribution of religions. It is not so much 

 the cleavage of geography into five branches, all springing from physical geography 

 like the lingers troni a hand, which is worthy of remark, but rather the recogni- 

 tion of the interaction of the conditions of ph}'sical geography with all other 

 geographical conditions. The scheme of geography thus acquired a unity and a 

 flexibility which it had not previously attained, but Kant's views have never 

 received wide recognition. If his geographical lectiires have been translated no 

 English or French edition has come under my notice, and such currency as they 

 obtained in Germany was checked bv the more concrete and brilliant work of 

 Humboldt, and the teleologicai system elaborated in overwhelming detail by 

 Eitter. / 



The teleologicai views of Hitter were substantially those of Paley. The world, 

 he found, fitted its inhabitants so well that it was obviously made for them down 

 to the minutest detail. The theory was one jieculiarly acceptable in the early 

 decades of the nineteenth century, and it had the immensely important result of 

 leading men to view the Earth as a great nuit with all its parts co-ordinated to 

 one end. It gave a philosophical, we may even say a theological, character to the 

 study of geography. 



Kant's views had pointed to such a v.nity, but from another side, that of evolu- 

 tioji. It was not until after Charles Darwin had fully restored the doctrine of 

 evolution to modern thought that it was forced upon thinking men that the fitness 

 of the Earth to its inhabitants might result not from its being made for them, but 

 from their having been shaped by it. It is certain that the influence of the 

 terrestrial environment upon the life of a people has been carried too far by some 

 writers — by Buckle, in his ' History of Civilisation,' for example — but it is no 

 less certain that this influence is a potent one. 



