108 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
map of to-day, no less than the landscape itself, may be a thing of joy 
to the eye of an artistic geographer; hill forms and stream meanderings 
may present a poem of rhythm and harmonies to a Vaughan Cornish. 
Inevitably he will try to penetrate beneath the surface, for he sees 
questions and desires answers, but let him beware! What matters from 
his standpoint is whether the rocks are porous, or impervious, or soluble ; 
how bedded and interbedded ; at what angles they come to the surface, 
and with what jointing and faulting; how they weather and what soils 
they yield. I would have the young geographer practised in the use of 
an almost Ruskinian, purely descriptive language, with terms drawn from 
the quarryman, the stonemason, the farmer, the alpine climber, and the 
water-engineer. Of course, it would be pedantic to press such a revolt 
too far; there are ready-made stores of appropriate knowledge in 
geological literature, but they are expressed in an alien tongue, from a 
standpoint other than the geographical. The geographer is concerned 
with the dynamic relations of the atmosphere and hydrosphere with the 
lithosphere ; as geographer he has little concern with geological horizons 
and epochs. None the less, the temptation to describe a region in terms 
of geological dates is besetting and insidious. It is a dangerous practice 
because it tends to lead the geographer away from his duty. Geology 
should be to the geographer what anatomy is to the artist ; the subsidiary 
subject makes a good servant but an ill master. 
My aim in this address has been to suggest that if you put the hydro- 
sphere rather than the lithosphere in the forefront of your geography, 
there at once emerges a certain unity permeating both aspects of the 
subject. Water carries and stores energy, whether that energy emanate 
directly from the sun or be controlled by life. Two agents, the sun and 
life, work in the same medium, water, and must therefore obey the same 
conditions. Life canalises some of the movements due to the sun. Coral 
reefs and man-built breakwaters impede the action of waves; beavers 
and men dam the flow of rivers. Rising to greater co-operative efforts, 
man irrigates the desert, connects the oceans by artificial straits, and 
intercepts energy from the waterfalls. At the present time—as it were in 
a great parenthesis of history—man taps vast but exhaustible stores of 
potential energy which, in past ages, were piled up by the hydrosphere in 
deposits of coal and oil. Thus, the water-borne character of our civilisation 
is for the moment partially masked. But essentially both Physical and 
Human Geography are concerned with the carriage and storage of energy 
on the surface of this earth, and the vehicle is the Protean element, water. 
Even the lightning is incidental to the cloud, and broadcast music depends 
on steam or water-power. 
There is not merely a philosophical consistency thus imported into 
geography—that in itself is of great value in an educational discipline— 
but there is also a complete change in practical outlook. When you treat 
the land forms as primary and think of the fluid movements as controlled 
by them, your mind inevitably looks back to the evolution of those forms, 
you think in terms of geology, of history ; but when you treat the fluid 
circulations as primary and think of the land forms as incidental to them, 
your mind is concentrated on the present; you are thinking dynamically, 
you are ready for action. In the first case, the geographer is consorting 
