SECTION E.—GEOGRAPHY. 
THE HUMAN HABITAT. 
ADDRESS BY 
THE RIGHT HON. SIR HALFORD J. MACKINDER, P.C. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION, 
In this Centenary Year it would be natural that a Sectional President 
should look back along the path that has been travelled since the time of 
William the Fourth. In the case of the Geographical Section, however, 
our history has been intertwined with that of the Royal Geographical 
Society, and it was obviously appropriate that the distinguished historian 
of that Society, Dr. Hugh Robert Mill, should complete his work by adding 
to it the annals of the Section. That task, at my invitation, he fulfilled 
for us yesterday with characteristic humour. My duty, therefore, lies in 
another direction: I have a Jubilee to celebrate. 
About half a century has elapsed since the Council of the Royal 
Geographical Society came gradually and with some controversy to the 
conclusion that if it would succeed in reforming geographical education 
it must transfer its attention from the Schools to the Universities. It was 
at Oxford, our Senior University, that a beginning was made. My 
memory goes back to my first lecture as University Reader there forty-four 
years ago. I had an audience of three, one man and two women. The 
man was a Don who told me he knew the geography of Switzerland, for 
he had just read Baedeker through from cover to cover. The two ladies 
brought their knitting. The University of Oxford is now at long last to 
complete the work of my successors by electing a Professor of the subject 
with full status and emoluments. In the interval every University in the 
country has set going the teaching of Geography. Thus, the decision to 
establish the Oxford Chair comes as the endorsement of a general movement 
and crowns a national development. Oxford is the right place for that 
crowning. Richard Hakluyt, the Elizabethan, was the first Oxford 
Reader in Geography ; I was only the second. Is it too late to suggest 
that the new Chair should be called the Hakluyt Professorship ? In the 
moment of triumph that would be a graceful gesture towards our elder 
sister, History. 
At the same time that Oxford decided to establish the new Professor- 
ship, it was announced that in due course an Honour School in Geography 
would be set up. Inevitably this will open once more the question of the 
content of the subject, for I do not imagine that Oxford will be satisfied 
by merely following alien models. Those of us who look back to the 
beginnings of the movement will remember the barren and wearisome 
discussions which turned round the attempt to obtain agreement on a 
formal definition of Geography. Probably none of us are to-day much 
