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But meanwhile there is one side of geography which is coming more and 
more to the front, bringing it more than ever within the scope of the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Man is the ultimate term in the 
geographical problem,’ said Dr. Scott Keltie some years since at the meeting at 
Toronto. ‘ Geography is a description of the earth as it is, in relation to man,’ 
said Sir Clements Markham, long President of the Royal Geographical Society. 
Geography, I venture to think, is becoming more and more a description of the 
earth as it is and as it will be under the working hand of man. It is becoming 
intensive rather than extensive. Geographers have to record, and will more 
and more have to record, how far man has changed and is changing the face of 
the earth, to try to predict how far he will change it in the coming centuries. 
The face of the earth has been unveiled by man. Will the earth save her face 
in the years before us, and, if she saves her face, will it be taken at face value? 
How far, for instance, will lines of latitude and longitude continue to have any 
practical meaning? 
Man includes the ordinary man, the settler, the agriculturist; man includes, 
too, the extraordinary—the scientific man, the inventor, the engineer. ‘Man,’ 
says a writer on the subject, ‘is truly a geographical agency,’ and I ask you to 
take account of this agency for a few minutes. I do so more especially because 
one of the chief features of the present day is the rise of the South; and the 
rise of the South—notably of Australia—is the direct result of human agency, 
on the one hand transforming the surface of the land, on the other eliminating 
distance. ‘The old name of Australia, as we all know, was New Holland. The 
name was well chosen in view of later history, for while no two parts of the 
world could be more unlike one another than the little corner of Europe known 
as Holland, or the Netherlands, and the great Southern Continent, in the one 
and in the other man has been pre-eminently a- geographical agency. 
The writer who used this phrase, ‘Man is a geographical agency,’ the 
American writer, Mr. G. P. Marsh, published his book, ‘Man and Nature,’ in 
1864, and a new edition, entitled ‘ The Earth as Modified by Human Action,’ in 
1874. He was mainly concerned with the destructiveness of man in the 
geographical and climatic changes which he has effected. ‘Every plant, every 
animal,’ he writes, ‘is a geographical agency, man a destructive, vegetables, 
and in some cases even wild beasts, restorative powers’; and again: ‘ It is in 
general true that the intervention of man has hitherto seemed to ensure the final 
exhaustion, ruin, and desolation of every province of Nature which he has 
reduced to his dominion.’ The more civilised man has become, he tells us, the 
more he has destroyed. ‘Purely untutored humanity interferes comparatively 
little with the arrangements of Nature, and the destructive agency of man 
becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he advances in civilisation.’ 
In short, in his opinion, ‘better fifty years of Cathay than a cycle of Europe.’ 
He took this gloomy view mainly on account of the mischief done by 
cutting down forests. Man has wrought this destruction not only with his own 
hand, but through domesticated animals more destructive than wild beasts, 
sheep, goats, horned cattle, stunting or killing the young shoots of trees. Writ- 
ing of Tunisia, Mr. Perkins, the late able Principal of Roseworthy College, says : 
‘In so far as young trees and shrubs are concerned, the passage of a flock of 
goats will do quite as much damage as a bush fire.’ Mr. Marsh seems to have 
met a fool in the forest, and it was man; and he found him to be more knave 
than fool, for man has been, in Mr. Marsh’s view, the revolutionary Radical 
confiscating Nature’s vested interests. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘has too long forgotten 
that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still 
less for profligate waste.’ Trees, to his mind, are Conservatives of the best kind. 
They stand in the way, it is true, but they stop excesses, they moderate the 
climate, they give shelter against the wind, they store the water, prevent inun- 
dations, preserve and enrich the soil. ‘The clearing of the woods,’ he says, ‘has 
in some cases produced within two or three generations effects as blasting as 
those generally ascribed to geological convulsions, and has laid waste the face 
of the earth more hopelessly than if it had been buried by a current of lava 
or a shower of voleanic sand’; and, once more, where forests have been 
destroyed, he says, ‘The face of the earth is no longer a sponge but a dust- 
heap.’ 
The damage done by cutting down trees, and thereby letting loose torrents 
