SECTION E.— GEOGRAPHY. 



THE SCOPE AND AIMS OF HUMAN 

 GEOGRAPHY. 



ADDRESS BY 



PROF. P. M. ROXBY, 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



It is only within comparatively recent times that the term ' Human 

 Geography ' has been employed even by geographers themselves. To 

 the general public it is hardly as yet familiar and, although it has now 

 found its way into geographical literature and text-books, its real meaning 

 and scope are liable to a more than ordinary degree of misconception. 

 Yet to many of us it represents a very vital and important part of geography, 

 and the present address is an attempt to review some of its fundamental 

 concepts and to estimate its value, actual and potential, as a contribution 

 to the study of human societies. 



Its emergence and significance cannot be understood apart from the 

 evolution of the modern conception of geography as a whole, but on this 

 wider theme I wish to say no more than is essential for my special purpose. 



It is not necessary to remind the present audience that although 

 geography has in recent times acquired a new technique and prominence, 

 the subject itself is of vast antiquity. It had its beginnings in the first 

 efforts of thinkers to understand the world in which they lived, the 

 significance and relationship of terrestrial phenomena and the place of 

 man in the scheme of things. As such it had an honourable position in 

 the Grseco-Roman world and, as conceived by various philosophers of 

 the Greek mainland, of Asia Minor and of Alexandria, was essentially a 

 philosophical study concerned with a reasoned description and, so far as 

 their limited horizon permitted, an interpretation of the Earth, including 

 its relations to man. Plato and Aristotle, indeed, were capable of 

 singularly facile generalisations about the effects of climate on human 

 behaviour, and we are reminded of Demolins' sweeping statements about 

 maritime societies by Plato's analysis of the influence of the sea, which he 

 tells us ' breeds double-dealing and perfidy ; it spreads a spirit which is 

 faithless and friendless over the inner life of a state and over its relations 

 with neighbouring states.' But in the main the Greek approach to 

 geography was scientific and informed by the same desire for a synthetic 

 view of the Earth as of a whole made up of related parts as animates us 

 to-day. The same is true of at any rate some of the Arab geographers, 

 from whom came the principal contributions to geographical knowledge 

 and thought in the long period of the eclipse of the scientific spirit in 

 Europe during the Dark and Early Middle Ages. 



