PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 429 
reclamation by guidance and by grants. In England, under the auspices of 
Birmingham University and under the Presidency of Sir Oliver Lodge, the Mid- 
lands Reafforestation Association is planting the pit mounds and ash quarries 
of the Black Country with trees which will resist smoke and bad air, alders, 
willows, poplars; carrying out their work, a report says, under a combina- 
tion of difficulties not to be found in any other country. Artificial lakes and 
reservoirs again, such as I shall refer to presently, are being made woodland 
centres. In most civilised countries nowadays living creatures are to some 
extent protected, tree planting is encouraged by Arbor days, and reserves are 
formed for forests, for beasts and birds, the survivors of the wild fauna of the 
earth. Some lands, such as Greece, as I gather from Mr. Perkins’ report, are 
still being denuded of trees, but as a general rule the human conscience is 
becoming more and more alive to the immorality and the impolicy of wasting the 
surface of the earth and what lives upon it, and is even beginning to take stock 
as to whether the minerals beneath the surface are inexhaustible. Therefore I 
ask you now to consider man as the lord of creation in the nobler sense of the 
phrase, as transforming geography, but more as a creative than as a destructive 
agency. 
F How far has the agency of man altered, how far is it likely to alter, 
the surface of the earth, the divisions and boundaries assigned by Nature, the 
climate, and the production of the different parts of the globe; and, further, 
how far, when not actually transforming Nature, is human agency giving Nature 
the go-by? It should be borne in mind that science has effected, and is effect- 
ing transformation, partly by applying to old processes far more powerful 
machinery, partly by introducing new. processes altogether; and that, as each 
new force is brought to light, lands and peoples are to a greater or less extent 
transformed. The world was laid out afresh by coal and steam. A new 
readjustment is taking place with the development of water power and oil 
power. Lands with no coal, but with fine water power or access to oil, are 
asserting themselves. Oil fuel is prolonging continuous voyages and making 
coaling stations superfluous. But of necessity it is the earth herself who gives 
the machinery for altering her own surface. The application of the machinery 
is contributed by the wit of man. 
The surface of the earth consists of land and water. How far has human 
agency converted water into land or land into water, and how far, without 
actually transforming land into water and water into land, is it for practical 
human purposes altering the meaning of land and water as the great 
geographical divisions? A writer on the Fens of South Lincolnshire has told 
us: ‘The Romans, not content with appropriating land all over the world, 
added to their territory at home by draining lakes and reclaiming marshes.” 
We can instance another great race which, while appropriating land all over the 
world, has added to it by reclaiming land from water, fresh or salt. The 
traveller from Great Britain to the most distant of the great British possessions, 
New Zealand, will find on landing at Wellington a fine street, Lambton Quay, 
the foreshore of the old beach, seaward of which now rise many of the city’s 
finest buildings on land reclaimed from the sea; and instances of the kind might 
be indefinitely multiplied. Now the amount of land taken from water by man 
has been taken more from fresh water than from sea, and, taken in all, the 
amount is infinitesimal as compared with the total area of land and water; but 
it has been very considerable in certain small areas of the earth’s surface, and 
from these small areas have come races of men who have profoundly modified 
the geography and history of the world. This may be illustrated from the 
Netherlands and from Great Britain. 
Motley, at the beginning of ‘The Dutch Republic,’ writes of the Nether- 
lands: ‘A region, outcast of ocean and earth, wrested at last from both domains 
their richest treasures.” Napoleon was credited with saying that the Nether- 
lands were a deposit of the Rhine, and the rightful property of him who con- 
trolled the sources; and an old writer pronounced that Holland was the gift of 
the ocean and of the rivers Rhine and Meuse, as Egypt is of the river Nile. 
The crowning vision of Goethe’s Faust is that of a free people on a free soil, 
won from the sea and kept for human habitation by the daily effort of man. 
Such has been the story of the Netherlands. The Netherlands, as a home for 
civilised men, were, and are, the result of reclamation, of dykes and polders. 
