4.06 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.—E. 
form, position and motion, rising through physical explanations of the relief of the 
Farth’s crust and its influence on the movements of the fluid envelopes to the con- 
sequent control of biological distributions, and culminating in the complicated actions 
and reactions of man and his environment. 
In Murchison’s time, and for a decade after his death in 1871, Section I was little 
more than a prolonged summer meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. The 
President was usually a leading member of the Council of the R.G.8., the Recorder 
was almost always either the Secretary, Librarian or Map Curator of the Society and 
the Committee contained few active outsiders. They organised the work of the 
Section, so far as there was any organisation at that time, and brought with them 
the huge wall-maps of the continents that used to grace the evening meetings of the 
Society in London. Many of these early meetings throbbed with dramatic thrills. 
When the Section assembled at Bath in 1864 to listen to what was expected to be a 
bitter controversy between Burton and Speke on the discovery of the great lakes of 
Africa, the tense audience heard instead the news of Speke’s tragic death from a gun 
accident on the previous afternoon. No less dramatic was the first appearance of 
H. M. Stanley before an English geographical audience at the Brighton meeting of 
1872, when he could scarcely conceal his chagrin at what he considered the humiliation 
of having to describe his finding of Livingstone to a provincial audience in a sea-side 
resort instead of to a distinguished gathering in the largest hall in London. 
The original papers read to the Section were habitually published in the Proceedings 
of the R.G.S. up to the time of the foundation of the Royal Scottish Geographical 
Society in 1885—the year in which the author attended the first of twenty-five con- 
secutive meetings of the Association. The Secretariat of the Section then received 
the permanent addition of a member of the staff of the Scottish Society and many of 
the papers read have since been printed in the Scottish Geographical Magazine. Pro- 
gressive developments ensued when, following the initiative of the R.G.S., lectureships 
or chairs of Geography were founded in British Universities, and the academic element 
in the management of the Section has now come to predominate over all others, the 
Recorder and most of the Secretaries since 1914 having been holders of University 
posts and independent of the Societies. This change coincides with the growing 
recognition of the scientific principles of Geography and with the great increase in the 
number of persons professionally engaged in geographical teaching, surveying and 
map-production. ; 
The 78 presidents of Section E since 1851 included 16 surveyors, cartographers or 
explorers, 13 University teachers of Geography or officials of the R.G.S., 13 whose 
life was mainly devoted to Geography but not as a profession (of these, Murchison 
counts as 7), 11 soldiers or sailors,excluding Royal Engineers and hydrographers, 10 
diplomatists or administrators, 8 men of science not geographers, and 7 archeologists 
or classical scholars. The change of presidential qualification with time stands out 
in the comparison of two of these groups for the 78 years and for three consecutive 
periods, the figures being given as a percentage of the whole number of presidents in 
each period :— 
issl- | 1851- 1885- 1919- 
1930. | 1884. 1916. 1930. 
| Soldiers and sailors, excluding Royal | | | | 
| Engineers and hydrographers_. 13 15 | 19 | 0 | 
| ,University teachers of Geography 
and R.G.S. officials . : é 17 0 22 | 50 | 
The author has followed, and to the best of his ability assisted, in the evolution of 
mere description of exploration and surveying into the exposition of problems of 
geographical research which throw light equally on the conditions of the home-land 
and of remoter regions. 
Committees subsidised by the Association on the nomination of the Section have 
made important contributions to the exploration of the East African Lake Region, 
the determination of comparative level of land and sea in and around the British 
Isles, the survey of Palestine, and the exploration of New Guinea, the Indian Ocean 
and the Polar regions, to mention only those purposes for which more than £200 
was granted. 
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