TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 559 
natural regions that we should consider each continent as composed of countries 
containing different regions divisible into districts each with its various localities 
or neighbourhoods. This would not interfere with such political terms as empire, 
state, province, county and parish. 
Some of the attempts to divide the world into natural regions will be reviewed, 
if time permits. 
Hitherto nothing has been said about Man. The different natural regions 
exist whether he is part of them or not. Even in the most complex class, 
the continent, he may not live at all, e.g. in Antarctica. In some natural 
regions he counts for no more than other animals. In others he has so pro- 
foundly altered the surface that it is necessary to consider him and his works in 
any classification. This is not merely the case in such districts as the Fens or 
the Lancashire coalfield, but even in such complex countries as China or those 
which border the Norland Seas of Europe, where much of the original forest 
has been converted into cultivated land. The concentration of man in cities 
obviously alters a locality. 
We must also differentiate between two natural regions originally of the 
same type, in one of which man has settled in farms, villages, and towns and 
added a new characteristic to it; and we must also distinguish between a 
natural region in its present condition from the same region in an earlier state, 
when man did not play the part in it that he does at present, e.g. Egypt or 
Mesopotamia, for we have also to consider reversion. 
Men in the natural region may be compared with nerve-cells in an animal. 
Some have a highly developed, others a very simple undifferentiated nervous 
(social) system. 
(iii) Zhe Significance of Natural Regions. 
There are many important consequences which cannot be examined in detail 
now. It is, however, desirable to point out that while it is possible to study 
men in families, races, &c., without taking into account that they form but 
a part of a more comprehensive entity, to do so is to deal with less than the 
whole problem. It does not suffice to give once and for all a brief description 
of the physical conditions of a country as a prelude to the account of the 
history of its inhabitants. The history is incomplete which does not consider 
both together at all stages. Neither is passive, neither remains unchanged 
when man becomes important enough to have a recorded history. The changes 
are not usually sharp and dramatic as in the American Prairies or in South 
_ Wales, but slow and subtle as in most countries of Europe. We are accustomed 
to think of the changes in the men; we rarely consider the changes in the region, 
which are also of vital significance. 
The entity higher than the individual is not the family, nor the race, nor 
any association of men alone, but the more complex association of the Natural 
Region. This has always been so, and until we recognise the fact neither the 
history of man, nor his relation to the universe, nor even his very pressing 
present problems, economic or political, can be properly understood. This is 
much too vast a subject to examine in detail on the present occasion; but I 
should like to add a note of warning to those who imagine that any such 
conclusions do more than show that the problems of the universe are somewhat 
more complex than is commonly supposed. It is not meant that the geographer 
can solve them; only that they cannot be solved without taking these geographical 
considerations into account. 
