104 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



the Natural Sciences, in the stricter sense, are alike systematic, and conse- 

 quently collateral studies, only touching each other at their margins. 

 The remaining group, on the other hand, both in its historical and in its 

 distributional aspect, derives its content and its data from any or all of 

 the systematic sciences. There is a historical aspect of botanical study, 

 for example, the palaeo-botany of fossil plants, linked with the field botany 

 and plant physiology of to-day by survivals of archaic forms of plant 

 life ; and there is a geographical aspect, the study of plant distributions, 

 with its intimate bearing on questions of descent and affinity, and its 

 corollary, cecology, which I take to be the special study of co-distributions. 



Similarly, there is a historical aspect of ethics, and aesthetics, and no 

 less a geographical aspect, brought latterly to some notoriety by current 

 controversies about the ' diffusion ' of ideas, as well as of techniques, 

 the latter being but the expression of ideas in the solid, in artefact instead 

 of behaviour. 



And throughout these distributional aspects and treatments of the 

 data of systematic sciences, both historical and regional considerations 

 are ever present, ubiquitous, inextricable from each other. At most we 

 may recognise by an obvious paradox that the geographer is concerned 

 with distributions which are relatively stable in point of time — land forms, 

 vegetation types, lines of communication — and the historian with sequences 

 which are relatively stable regionally — the doings of this or that body of 

 people more or less permanently sedentary within a- particular complex 

 of geographical conditions. The geographer, that is to say, leaves the 

 larger history of his land-forms to the historical geologist, of his vegetation 

 to the historical botanist, of his lines of communication to the archseologist, 

 for demonstration in detail ; and devotes himself to the diverse regional 

 combinations which result from their respective distributions, which are 

 all inore or less world-wide. The historian similarly leaves the larger 

 distribution of these same factors to the student of their world-wide 

 occurrences, and concentrates his attention on the sequence of events in 

 the ' region ' where those are relatively unchanged in time, and consequently 

 compose the permanent regional stage on which the processes of history 

 occur. 



But it follows from this, that, in the same way as the geographer fails 

 of his duty if he overlooks the fact that, from mountains and the tides to 

 town-planning and aviation, he is in fact dealing with distributions which 

 are changing, though their rates of change vary almost infinitely, so the 

 historian fails to appreciate the significance of historical events if he 

 ignores those historically permanent limitations within which all human 

 revolutions occur, and to which the most stable of human institutions 

 owe nearly all the stability they have. 



To take an elementary instance. Man, it has been truly said, ' does 

 not live by bread alone.' Where the lagoons of Ostia and the Via Solaria 

 stood in the primitive economy of the city of Rome and in its relations 

 with its inland neighbours, and the salt-mines of Hallstatt in the com- 

 mercial and cultural relations of the Danubian cultures, there stood 

 Alexandria's command of the salt-works in Ptolemaic Egypt, the long 

 significance of Palmyra in the history of the Nearer East, and the gabelle 

 in the rise and fall of a national monarchy in France ; and it is without 



