94 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



studied does she irradiate with life and light all the paths which human 

 activity dares to tread . . . Ought it not to repay our trouble for the 

 sake of the history of man and of nations to take our stand ... in the 

 place of their united activities, and to consider the earth in its real relations 

 to man ; ... to trace the course of the simplest as well as the most 

 diffused geographical laws in results, some of which are settled and 

 permanent, some changing, some living and organic 1 ' And he foresees 

 a time when the world of nature as well as of morals and mind shall have 

 been so far compassed as to make it possible for the far-seeing among men 

 ' sending their glance backwards and forwards, to determine from the whole 

 of a nation's surroundings what the course of its development is to be, 

 and to indicate in advance of history what ways it must take to retain the 

 welfare which providence has appointed for every nation whose direction 

 is right and whose conformity to law is constant.' It may perhaps be 

 said that the main difference of view among modern geographers centres 

 in the question whether ' the twofold study of distribution and of the 

 correlation of phenomena ' of itself ' assures the place of geography as a 

 separate branch of knowledge ' without necessarily involving their relation- 

 ship to .human life. 



However this may be, the framework which the great pioneers of the 

 early nineteenth century defined for the building up of a geographical 

 synthesis, which in Ritter's view culminated in man's relationship to 

 the Earth, was sufficiently wide to permit of many converging con- 

 tributions. Workers in many fields of geography were henceforth 

 guided by the same fundamental principles, and methods, and whether in 

 geomorphology, in climatic or human geography, the central object became 

 to exhibit the Earth as a whole made up of related and interacting parts. 



Thus, there has been developed by men such as Suess, W. M. Davis 

 and de Margerie the outlines of a systematic interpretation of land-forms, 

 a reasoned and synthetic view of the earth's surface-features (geo- 

 morphology). Similarly, there has evolved through the sifting and 

 interpretation of meteorological data a true climatic geography which, 

 as I think all who have profited by such an admirable and lucid exposition 

 as Kendrew's Climates of the Continents will agree with me, is something 

 quite distinct from meteorology, however dependent upon it. Again, the 

 study of plant geography, i.e. of plant associations or types of natural 

 vegetation in relation to specific types of physical environment, has been 

 worked out in considerable detail and in intimate relationship to the 

 geography of both climates and soils. So, too, we have a systematic 

 geography of animal life. It is no doubt true that some of the workers 

 in these contributory fields have been initially trained in the special 

 science which supplied the data, i.e. have been in the first instance 

 geologists or zoologists, but it is equally remarkable that many of them, 

 when once they have acquired the geographical outlook, have changed 

 their objective and become primarily interested in placing or interweaving 

 their contribution in the geographical synthesis as such. For it is from 

 these main sources — ^geomorphology, climatic and biological (plant and 

 animal) geography — that we derive the data for building up that syste- 

 matic geography of natural environments which is at once the objective 

 of ' physical ' geography and the starting-point of human geography. 



