^46 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 



Section E.— GEOGEAPHY. 

 President of the Sectiox — Major E. H. Hills, C M.G., R.E. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3. 



The President delivered the following Address — 



The thirty years that have elapsed since the British Association last met in 

 this city of Dublin have seen an obvious and rapid progress in the science of 

 geography, and a steady though perhaps not quite so apparent a change in 

 the character of that science. 



In 1878 large parts of the earth's surface still remained untrodden by the feet 

 of a white man ; large areas were open to the enterprise and intrepidity of the 

 explorer; large spaces were blank paper upon our maps. N(5w there is but little 

 of the earth's surface absolutely unknown. 



It is not my intention to detain you by any recapitulation of the work of these 

 years to show you how and by whom these areas have been traversed and the gaps 

 in our maps filled in. I intend rather to speak of the present and of the future 

 work of the geographer, and to do this to any advantage we must at the outset 

 recognise the change that has taken place in the nature of his task, and the fact 

 that the days of individual exploration are over, never to return. We must 

 recognise that sporadic, unorganised effort must be and is being replaced by 

 organised, systematic work, and that the scientific traveller of the last century, 

 with his rough map-making equipment, his compass, watch, and sextant has 

 yielded his place to the scientifically equipped survey-party with their steel tapes, 

 theodolites, and plane tables. 



The theme is not a new one to this Section. I find on referring to the trans- 

 actions of past years that in 1902, at the Belfast meeting, Sir Thomas Holdich, 

 the President of Section E, said : ' We find those spaces within which pioneer 

 exploration can be usefully carried out to be so rapidly contracting year by year as 

 to force upon our attention the necessity for adapting our methods for a pro- 

 gressive system of worldwide map-making, not only to the requirements of abstract 

 science but to the utilitarian demands of commercial and political enterprise.' 



These words express succinctly the ideas that I wish to take as the text of my 

 address to-day. I am, however, not ambitious enough to attempt to cover the 

 whole surface of the earth in the brief review that I intend to put before you 

 of the progress of scientific survey. Rather I wish to restrict our outlook to 

 that section of the work in which we may all be considered as having a direct 

 personal interest — namely, the survey of the British empire, especially those lands 

 under the more immediate tutelage of the Government of this country. Let it not 

 be thought, however, that while we for the moment pay little attention to the 

 regions lying outside this definition, we are supporting the fallacious idea that the 

 survey of any part of the earth can be considered apart from the survey of the 



