98 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES, 
by bracketing together, formally and superficially, really incongruous 
elements. A house that is builded upon the sands cannot stand. But 
we all feel, we who have the love of maps, that somewhere in geography 
there is a fundamental unity which eludes us. Is not our difficulty how 
to weld together the geological and the human aspects of the subject ? 
To have stated your problem is to have gone a long way towards solving 
it. Is it not perhaps the lure of geomorphology which has been mis- 
leading us? Iam not prepared to go quite all the way with Prof. Douglas 
Johnson of Columbia University, who would wholly exclude geomorphology 
from geography, but I am ready to regard it as a secondary and not the 
primary factor. Geomorphology, as it has now developed, has internal 
coherence and a consistent philosophy, and in their hunger for these joys 
many of our geographers, it seems to me, have blinded themselves to the 
fact that as geomorphologists they are not in the centre but on the margin 
of geography. I had almost said that in escaping from servitude they 
had robbed the Egyptians, the geologists, and had been cursed for the 
possession of ill-gotten goods by a generation spent in the wilderness. 
What is it that really gives a unique interest to the surface of this 
earth? Surely not its dead features; there are mountains also on the 
moon, ruins from a live past. Is it not the fluid envelopes, the water 
and the air, which by their circulations, their physical and chemical 
reactions, and their relation to life, impart to the earth’s surface an activity 
almost akin to life itself? Which is the fundamental—the living, 
palpitating being or the dead skeleton which it shapes and leaves behind 
as a monument? Which is the prior—function or form? I admit that 
in my earlier writings I myself went often astray, attracted by the 
antithesis which Archibald Geikie drew in his Textbook of Geology between 
the laying down of the rocks and the shaping from those rocks of the 
existing surface. It seemed that the former was geology and the latter 
geography. It seems to me to-day that it is in the water rather than in 
the rocks that we must look for our salvation. 
Let me here interpose an idea which I accept from the astronomers. 
I quote from Jeans in his ‘ Universe Around Us,’ but have taken the 
liberty of slightly rearranging the order of the selected sentences so as to 
present an epitome of the argument while retaining authoritative 
wording :— 
“The old view that every point of light in the sky represented a 
possible home for life is quite foreign to modern astronomy. By far 
the greater part of the matter of the Universe is at a temperature of 
millions of degrees. There can be no life where atoms change their 
make-up millions of times a second and no pair of atoms can ever 
stay jomed together, for the very concept of life implies duration in 
time. It also implies a certain mobility in space, and these two 
implications restrict life to the small range of physical conditions in 
which the liquid state is possible. We know of no type of astronomical 
body in which the conditions can be favourable to life except planets 
like our own revolving round a sun. Of the rare plantary systems 
in the sky, many must be entirely lifeless, and in others life, if it 
exists at all, is probably limited to a few planets. If life is to obtain 
a footing, the planets must not be too hot or too cold. We cannot 
