ses) eee 
E.—GEOGRAPHY 97 
in India, with its fine cadastral records, there are potentialities of measuring 
the erosion of the hillsides and the corresponding formation of deltas. 
In most maritime countries another possibility of quantitative study 
exists in the relentless crumpling of the earth’s surface which is slowly 
raising some coast lines and depressing others. ‘These, after all, are only 
casual examples of the knowledge which is capable of being gleaned in 
this part of the geographical field—the part commonly described as 
physical geography. And, incidentally, it seems less than justice to 
stigmatise this branch of our science as synthetic. It relies for help 
on research in climatology, meteorology, oceanography and so on; but 
its problems have a dignity of their own, and a clear place in the general 
pursuit of physical knowledge. The surface of our lithosphere ; its 
response to the influences which beat upon it—rain, winds, tides, ocean 
currents, etc.; the processes of denudation, accretion, desiccation, 
fertility, and so on, these offer material for study and the systematic 
assemblage and analysis of facts which justify the claim I set out to urge 
on behalf of geography as a whole. The philosophy and purpose of 
physical geography will be discussed later ;. they are in close accord 
with the reflections in which we indulged as we meditated on pre-historic 
geography. 
irr 
Meanwhile let me turn to another aspect of geography, more familiar 
to most of us laymen because it bulked so largely in our early education— 
that side of it which is associated with history and is sometimes called 
political geography. In the dark ages of last century to which I am 
always alluding, it hardly merited so imposing a name; for the theme 
of our ordinary school maps was mainly the division of the land into 
national and administrative areas ; and the acme of absurdity was reached 
when we were set to draw maps of England, with its counties a mosiac 
of gaudy colours, but often with no place for rivers, mountains or even 
towns. From that imbecility it seems a long journey to a modern 
historical atlas, such for example as the admirable compendium edited 
by Mr. Ramsay Muir. But the relation of geography to history is still 
far from sufficiently intimate in our ordinary teaching of either subject. 
This would be true even if it referred only to the intelligent use of 
maps as adjuncts, so to say, of visual instruction in history. To take 
an example, consider how few persons of a normal standard of education 
could sketch, with the haziest approach to accuracy, a picture of the 
Europe with which Cromwell had to deal, or contrast it with the Europe 
which Napoleon started to reconstruct. Then think how little terrors 
such a question would have for anyone who had glanced at two half- 
pages in Mr. Ramsay Muir’s atlas. On one side he would have seen, 
the date being that of our English Restoration, three of the great con- 
tinental powers of that day—Sweden, Poland and Turkey—holding 
between them a solid block of territory stretching from the Arctic Ocean 
to the Mediterranean, which shut Russia off from the sea and out of 
Europe, dominated Prussia and dwarfed all the modern States of Central 
Europe. On the opposite half-page he would have observed that, when 
E 
