E.—GEOGRAPHY. 105 
he may study the historic present ; but whether he study present or past, 
he is primarily concerned with space, and with time only in the sense 
that everything has momentum. The present consists of a coming out 
of the past and a going into the future; there is a complex dynamic 
present in the sense of a balance of forces, all severally waxing and waning 
in different degrees. The student of the hydrosphere is concerned with 
water, sap, and blood, moving under sun power and life initiative. Some 
of the shapes governed by his circulations are relatively stable, such 
as land forms, but not much more so than the forms, say, of his sea 
currents or of the average distribution of rainfall as depicted on his 
maps. Even the distribution of human population is, as we have just 
seen, subject to a momentum which overrides the attraction of great 
physical opportunities. 
Let us now turn for a moment to a not improbable relation of the 
hydrosphere to human—and perhaps all living—initiative. It is of the 
essence of life, whatever that may be, that it can oppose itself to the blind 
pressure of changing environment and, provided the change be not too 
_ violent, new species thus arise by survival of the fittest. Of all the changes 
of environment to which living beings are subject the most general and 
potent are undoubtedly due, directly and indirectly, to variations in the 
amount and mode of water supply. Let me cite one well-known fact by 
way of illustration. A newly-born babe has some prehensile power in 
its feet and some tendency to oppose its great toé to the other four. This 
is interpreted as indicative of a four-handed ancestry living in the trees. 
_ Sir Arthur Thompson has suggested that in some past geological epoch 
increasing drought slowly reduced the areas of forest and drove some of 
the over-crowded population to forsake their leafy homes, compelling them 
to become bipeds. The inference is obvious that in fighting against 
drought and frost terrestrial life is stimulated to initiative. 
The same thing is true in regard to development of human society. 
There is one point, for example, in which the East and the West are alike ; 
In large areas of both, owing to seasonal interruption of the rainfall and to 
winter frost, the growing period of vegetation is limited to certain months 
ofthe year. That is not the case with the tropical forests of South America 
and West Africa ; and it is noteworthy that in the Malayan region of the 
_ East, where there is tropical continuity of heat and rainfall, the human 
_ population is sparse, except of late in Java under the western control of 
¢ Holland. Here in the abundance of moisture humanity appears to lack 
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the incentive to development. 
The chief weapon in the fight for water against drought and frost is 
Capital. In its simplest form, Capital consists in the saving of food for 
_ the annual season of drought or frost. The biblical Joseph who laid up 
_ in the seven good years for the seven bad years was a Statesman who 
_ knew the value of so-called ‘ liquid ’ capital. 
But if West and East have this in common, they differ greatly in their 
actual output of human energy. What has our study of the hydrosphere 
to sayin that regard? Civilisation seems to have begun most remarkably 
at the geographical centre of the world: in the region around Suez, 
where the eastern and western oceans approach one another at the 
_ junction of Asia and Africa. You will remember that the medieval monks 
