TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 445 
Skotion E.—GEOGRAPHY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SEcTION—Rear-ApmiraL Sir W. J. L. Warton, 
K.C.B., F.R.S. 
CAPE TOWN. 
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Ir is sometimes denied to Geography that she has any right to consider herself as 
a science, the objection being apparently founded on the view that it is a subject 
that can be learnt by heart, but not studied on any systematic line or reduced to 
principles which enable advance to be made, as in the more exact sciences, by 
continual investigation by means of laws discovered in the course of such investi- 
gation. This, it appears to me, is a misapprehension due to an incomplete 
recognition of what Science is, and of what Geography is. 
Science is, in its simplest interpretation, ‘knowledge,’ such knowledge as comes 
from an intimate acquaintance with and study of any subject duly co-ordinated 
andarranged, The subjects which the advancing education and civilisation of the 
world have caused to be minutely studied are very many, and as knowledge has 
increased specialisation has become a necessity, until the list of sciences is very 
long. 
Science may be broadly divided into several categories. 
Pure or Exact Science, such as Mathematics; Natural or Physical Science, 
which rests on observations of Nature ; Moral Science, which treats of all mental 
phenomena. 
Some Sciences are of ancient foundation, some have arisen from new inquiries 
and needs of man, or from fissure in subjects too wide for convenient treatment 
as one. 
Many of them are capable of exact definition, and their boundaries and limits 
can be well marked. 
To others no very distinct limitations can be assigned. From their nature they 
overlap and are overlapped by other subjects, and it is impracticable to confine 
them by a strict line. 
Geography is one of the latter. 
Geography is one of the most ancient subjects studied with a view of co- 
ordinating facts. A desire for exact knowledge of, first, the bearings and distances 
of one place from another for the purposes of intercommunication must have 
arisen as soon as men became collected into groups whose growing civilisation and 
needs required travel to obtain what could not be obtained in the community. 
This was the earliest form of Geography, and it is an aspect which still remains, 
and to some is, in the modern shape of maps, the principal, if not the sole, end of 
Geography. 
