E.—GROGRAPHY. 87 
the mental processes of its inhabitants.’ Dr. Millistoo profound a man 
of science not to guard himself, by that saving word ‘ ultimate,’ from 
such retorts as Professor Ellsworth Huntington, of Yale, has offered 
to the extreme American statement. If, the latter argued, Geography 
is actually the study of the human response to land-forms, then, as a 
science if is in its infancy, or, rather, it has returned to a second 
childhood; for it has hardly begun to collect, exact data to this 
particular end, or to treat them statistically, or to apply to them the 
methods of isolation that exact science demands. In this country 
geographers are less inclined to interpret ‘New Geography’ on such 
revolutionary lines; but one suspects a tendency towards the 
American view in both their principles and their practice—in their 
choice of lines of inquiry or research and their choice of subjects for 
education. The concentration on Man, which characterises geographical 
_ teaching in the University of London, and the almost exclusive attention 
paid to Economic Geography in the geographical curricula of some 
other British Universities make in that direction. In educational 
practice, this bias does good, rather than harm, if the geographer 
bears in mind that Geography proper has only one function to perform 
in regard to Man—namely, to investigate, account for, and state his 
distribution over terrestrial space—and that this function cannot be 
performed to any good purpose except upon a basis of Physical Geo- 
graphy—that is, on knowledge of the disposition and relation of the 
Earth’s physical features, so far as ascertained to date. To deal with 
the effect of Man’s distribution on his mental processes or political 
and economic action is to deal with him geographically indeed, but by 
applications of Geography to Psychology, to History, to Sociology, to 
_ Ethnology, to Economics, for the ends of these sciences; though the 
interests of Geography may be, and often are, well served in th» process 
by reflection of light on its own problems of distribution. Tf in instrue- 
tion,’as distinct from research, the geographer, realising that, when 
he introduces these subjects to his pupils, he will be teaching them 
not Geography, but another science with the help of Geography, insists 
on their having been grounded previously or elsewhere in what he 
is to apply—namely, the facts of physical Distribution—all will be 
well. The application will be a sound step forward in education, more 
potent perhaps for training general intelligence than the teaching of 
pure Geography at the earlier stage, because making a wider and more 
compelling appeal to imaginative interest and pointing the adolescent 
mind to a more complicated field of thought. But if Geography is 
applied to instruction in other sciences without the recipients having 
learned what it is in itself, then all will be wrong. The teacher will 
talk a language not understood, and the value of what he is applying 
cannot be appreciated by the pupils. ; 
If I leave this argument there for the moment, it is with the intention 
_ of returning to it before I end to-day. It goes to the root, as it seems 
to me, of the unsatisfactory nature of much geographical instruction 
given at present in our islands. The actual policy of the English 
Board of Education seems to contemplate that Geography should be 
taught to secondary students only in connection with History. Tf 
