434 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION EF. 
Lithgow will export mineral direct, saying good-bye to the Blue Mountains and 
even to Sydney Harbour. 
Now, in saying this I may well be told by my scientific colleagues that it 
is all very well as a pretty piece of fooling, but that it is not business. I say 
it as an unscientific man with a profound belief in the unbounded possibilities of 
science. How long is it since it was an axiom that, as a lump of iron sinks in 
water, a ship made of iron could not possibly float? Is it fatuous to contem- 
plate that the conquest of the air, which is now beginning, will make it a highway 
for commercial purposes? We have aeroplanes already which settle on the 
water and rise again; we are following on the track of the gulls which we 
wonder at in the limitless waste of ocean. A century and a half ago the 
great Edmund Burke ridiculed the idea of representatives of the old North 
American colonies sitting in the Imperial Parliament; he spoke of any such 
scheme as fighting with Nature and conquering the order of Providence; he 
took the distance, the time which would be involved—six weeks from the 
present United States to London. If anyone had told him that what is happen- 
ing now through the applied forces of science might happen, he would have 
called his informant a madman. Men think in years, or at most in lifetimes; 
they ought sometimes to think in centuries. I believe in Reclus’s words, ‘ All 
man has hitherto done is a trifle in comparison with what he will be able 
to effect in future.’ Science is like a woman. She says No again and again, 
but she means Yes in the end. 
In dealing with Jand and water I have touched upon natural divisions and 
natural boundaries, which are one of the provinces of geography. Flying gives 
the go-by to all natural divisions and boundaries, even the sea; but let us come 
down to the earth. Isthmuses are natural divisions between seas; the ship 
canals cut them and link the seas—the canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, 
the canal which cuts the Isthmus of Perekop between the Crimea and the 
mainland of Russia, the Baltic Canal, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal. The 
Suez Canal, it will be noted, though not such a wonderful feat as the Panama 
Canal, is more important from a geographical point of view, in that an open 
cut has been made from sea to sea without necessity for locks, which surmount 
the land barrier but more or less leave it standing. Inland, what are natural 
divisions? Mountains, forests, deserts, and, to some extent, rivers. Take 
mountains. ‘ High, massive mountain systems,’ writes Miss Semple, ‘ present 
the most effective barriers which man meets on the land surface of the earth.’ 
But are the Rocky Mountains, for instance, boundaries, dividing-lines, to 
anything like the extent that they were now that railways go through and over 
them, carrying hundreds of human beings back and fore day by day? On 
what terms did British Columbia join the Dominion of Canada? That the 
natural barrier between them should be pierced by the railway. Take the 
Alps. The canton Ticino, running down to Lake Maggiore, is politically in 
Switzerland ; it is wholly on the southern side of the Alps. Is not the position 
entirely changed by the St. Gothard tunnel, running from Swiss territory into 
Swiss territory on either side of the mountains? 
If, in the Bible language, it requires faith to remove mountains, it is not 
wholly so with other natural boundaries. Forests were, in old days, very real 
natural dividing-lines. They were so in England, as in our own day they have 
been in Central Africa. Between forty and fifty years ago, in his ‘ Historical 
Maps of England,’ Professor C. H. Pearson, whose name is well known and 
honoured in Australia, laid down that England was settled from east and west, 
because over against Gaul were heavy woods, greater barriers than the sea. 
Kent was cut off from Central England by the Andred Weald, said to have 
been, in King Alfred’s time, 120 miles long and 30 broad. Here are Professor 
Pearson’s words: ‘The axe of the woodman clearing away the forests, the 
labour of nameless generations reclaiming the fringes of the fens or making 
their islands habitable, have gradually transformed England into one country, 
inhabited by one people. But the early influences of the woods and fens are 
to isolate and divide.” Thus the cutting down of trees is sometimes a good, 
not an evil, and there are some natural boundaries which man can wholly 
obliterate. 
Can the same be said of deserts? They can certainly be pierced, like 
isthmuses and like mountains. The Australian desert is a natural division 
