E.—GEOGRAPHY 95 
speculation in picturing some of the tremendous changes which have 
taken place in the distribution of land and sea since the Tertiary era. 
The union of England and France by a river valley instead of a stormy 
Channel would be a relatively modern feature in the landscape ; so would 
the land-bridges across the Mediterranean, of which only the broken 
piers remain in Malta and certain other islands. Working backwards, 
the student would see North America severed from South America by an 
ocean which has long receded ; and Africa divided in two by another 
great stretch of water. As if in compensation, he would find the Asiatic 
continent running unbroken through Malaya into Borneo and Java, 
until it faced, across a comparatively narrow waterway, the ancient 
Australiasian continent, which embraced Celebes, New Guinea, their 
adjacent archipelago and our modern Australia. To depict in the 
imagination a world so constituted, is given to few of us; but I would 
suggest one help, however inadequate, in carrying the fancy back into the 
Tertiary age. Climb the Puy de Déme—now an easy enough task— 
on a clear day, and let the eye travel slowly over the mass of clear-cut 
volcanic cones which surround you on almost every side, ranging from 
mountains 4,000 feet high to mere pimples on cultivated fields. Then 
imagine all these at work, belching out flame and fume, lava and sulphur, 
the sky darkened by smoke and dust, and the earth a maze of roaring 
furnaces. It is from such an inferno that time has evolved the smiling 
landscape of Auvergne to-day. 
Out of any attempted survey of this particular part of the field, or 
what we might call pre-historic geography, two reflections emerge. 
The first is that, at this phase, geography is entirely dependent on 
other sciences, especially geology, and cannot yet claim an independent 
existence. The second is that, at this phase, it has hardly any conceivable 
interest for us except in relation to the movements of life—and primarily 
of man—about the globe. Amid these forgotten seas, those wastes of 
glaciers and zones of volcanic fire, there seem to have been stray enclaves 
of habitable land. It is those oases which form the focus of our interest 
to-day, with the help which they give in explaining the sharply differential 
characteristics of certain races of the human family. Or, if the mind 
turns rather to the puzzling similarities which have been detected in 
widely scattered races, it may find, in the hypothesis of old land-bridges 
over otherwise pathless oceans, support for the theory of early migrations. 
Did the primitive Mongol, after long isolation in eastern Asia, succeed 
in drafting some of his tribes across the Bering Strait to become the 
progenitors of the American Indian? Did the human family which we 
call the Alpine race, imprisoned through a long glacial epoch in Turkestan, 
ultimately force their way into Russia, the Balkans, Mesopotamia and 
Southern India? Similarly, did the stock which scientists try to dis- 
entangle as the Nordic, after protracted incubation behind the Ural 
mountains, issue through the melting ice into the Baltic coasts and finally 
dominate the Indo-European situation? Or was the conformation of 
the ancient continents such as to permit the aboriginal negroes of Africa 
to wander, almost all the way dry-shod, the enormous distances through 
Asia to Australia or into Melanesia? These are gigantic assumptions ; 
