100 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



such questions can be answered. Similar questions arise concerning the 

 future of Southern Brazil, Malaya, parts of Central and Eastern Asia and 

 many other regions where groups with different racial characteristics and 

 aptitudes are in competition. The racial aspect is only one of several, 

 but the study of racial distributions, based on anthropological material in 

 the same sense that geomorphology is based on geological material, seems 

 an essential element in the content of human geography. Personally, I 

 feel it to be a distinct gain that in at least one university geography should 

 be closely associated with anthropology, so long as it is not identified with 

 it, just as in others it is more closely associated with economics or history 

 or with physical science. Provided that the subject is kept free and 

 unfettered, it is an advantage to have contributions from special angles. 

 My colleagues will have no more doubt than I have that the field of 

 geographical study, however wide, is definite, but I think they will also 

 agree with me that a complete school of geography is a remote ideal and 

 a complete geographer an almost impossible conception, so that some 

 difference of emphasis between the various schools of geography is not 

 only permissible but desirable in the interests of the subject. 



It is unnecessary for my present purpose to elaborate what is implied 

 in that aspect of man's adjustment whose study forms the subject-matter 

 of economic geography. It is of course a fundamental and basic aspect, 

 including the geography of production (with agricultural and industrial 

 geography as its principal subsections) and the geography of exchange 

 (commercial geography in the more technical sense). Partly because it 

 is so fundamental and of such obvious utility and partly, no doubt, because 

 the material is more easily available and the technique involved in its use 

 easier to elaborate, it is this branch of geography which on the whole has 

 made most progress in this country during recent years, so that we now 

 have a large and growing literature in it, including both comprehensive 

 works on its whole field and also detailed regional studies. Here it is no 

 less than a duty to pay a tribute to the valuable service rendered by the 

 geographical departments of the University of London. This develop- 

 ment is as it should be, but yet I am convinced that we run the risk of 

 losing the unity and cultural value of geography if we overstress the 

 purely economic aspects and make, for example, the distribution, actual 

 and potential, of products and manufactures the supreme objective. 

 Economic geography serves one of its highest functions if it is closely 

 linked with other aspects of human adjustment to physical environment 

 which have so far received less attention. Of these, one of the most inter- 

 esting and profoundly important is that which, for want of a better term, 

 we usually call social geography. This may be broadly defined as the 

 analysis of the regional distribution and inter-relation of different forms of 

 social organisation arising out of particular modes of life which themselves 

 represent a direct response — although we maj^ concede to M. Febvre not 

 necessarily the only possible response — to distinctive types of physical 

 environment. A classical example of the importance of this aspect is of 

 course the age-long conflict between nomadic, patriarchal pastoralists and 

 peasant cultivators, socially organised on a territorial basis, along the 

 grassland borders of the hot deserts in Africa and Arabia and round the 

 edges of the steppe-belt in Euro-Asia. In modern times the problems 



