TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 743 



advauce of science. How this happened will he manifest if we reflect that general 

 or physical geography is the basis, not only of special geography, but also of geology ; 

 and that just when Humboldt was vitiating his description of Asia with Elie de 

 Beaumont's speculations on the origin of mountains, and was conveying the 

 impression that general geography was equivalent to the entirety of natural science, 

 Lyell was shaping physical geography to the ends of the geologist, and making it a 

 key to unlock the past. The result, so far as geography is concerned, may be seen 

 at the present day in the time-table of many an English girls' school. Separate 

 hours are set apart for ' physical geography ' and for ' geography.' The one is studied 

 with a text-book written from the geological standpoint, the other in a manual 

 of mere names lit up occasionally with a few ideas drawn from Ritter or Strabo. 

 Thus it was that geography was divorced from physical geography to be unequally 

 yoked with history. Peschel restored physical geography to the geographer, and 

 made it the implement of analj-sis in the held of Liinderkunde. 



But while the geographers had gone astray in the wake of Humboldt, the 

 geologists neglected that great chapter of their subject which they hold to-day 

 in common with the geographers. Stratigraphy, palaeontology, and mineralogy 

 claimed their first attention, and it was only after a time that Ramsay and Geikie 

 among the English geologists, and Dana among the Americans, began to study 

 what we now call geomorphology — the causal description of the earth's present 

 relief. It was Peschel who asserted the claim of geography to include geomorpho- 

 logy, and so rendered possible a genetic, as opposed to a merely conventional classi- 

 fication of the features of relief. Though common to both studies, it plays a 

 different part in each. The geologist looks at the present that he may interpret 

 the past ; the geographer looks at the past that he may interpret the present. The 

 geographer's argument begins, as we have said, with the surface of the earth, but 

 to his almost artistic perception of land-forms he must add a causal analysis ; pre- 

 cisely as the artist learns anatomy the better to grasp the human outlines. 



Peschel's criticism of Ritter is less happy than that which he gave to Hum- 

 boldt. He complains of Ritter 's use of the expression ' Comparative Geography,' and 

 substitutes another of his own. As a matter of fact, all geography which is not 

 merely descriptive must be comparative, and the various uses of the term made by 

 different writers are but particular cases of one of the most general ideas in scien- 

 tific method. Vareuius called all geography comparative that was not mathe- ■ 

 matical or astronomical. Ritter compared peoples with the lands they inhabited, 

 in order to establish the influence of environment. Peschel compared one physical 

 feature with another, with the object of discovering their origin. Markham uses 

 comparative geography to imply a comparison of historical records, with a view 

 to showing the changing aspects of the same locality at different times. Peschel's 

 difference with Ritter is, in this matter, a merely verbal quibble. Nor can we say 

 much more with reference to his obvious dislike of Ritter's teleological views, 

 which, though they colour every statement he makes, yet do not affect the essence ; 

 it is easy to re-state each proposition in the most modern evolutionary terms. 

 Where, however, Peschel questions the adequacy of particular correlations of peoples 

 and environments, it must be admitted that he usually strikes between the joints, 

 and this is still more evident when he has to deal with Ritter's daring follower, 

 Buckle. The truth of the matter is that Ritter and Buckle had taken for their 

 field the highest and most difficult chapter in geography, and that they underrated 

 the complexity of the problems with which they had to deal. We are all familiar 

 with the saying that it required the Greeks in Greece to develop the Athenian 

 civilisation, and that neither the Greeks elsewhere, nor any other race in Greece, 

 would have been equal to the achievement. It would be easy for a Peschel to 

 demonstrate the falsity of an assertion that the Greeks owed all to Greece, but, 

 on the other hand, the Ritters and Buckles were in error in attempting so simple 

 an explanation. What seems to have been constantly omitted from these specu- 

 lations is the fact that communities can move from one environment to another ; 

 that even a given environment alters from generation to generation ; and that an 

 existing community is often the product of two or more communities in past 

 generations, each of them subject to a different environment. Now, the influences 



