E.—GEOGRAPHY 105 
it, and what they do. We should also, if time permits, be interested to 
know something of its story in the past, what men in it have fought for, 
whether it has often changed hands or creeds, and such personal details 
as to why we call it Oslo when it was once Christiania, or why old St. 
Petersburg is now Leningrad or whatever its name is to-day or may 
happen to be to-morrow. When we get outside the cities, the countryside 
also has its tale. Is it agricultural ; and if so, what is the pressure of 
population on it; or is it mainly a land of manufacturing activities ? 
How much of it is unoccupied, and why ; has it been converted into a 
home for grouse and stags instead of hardy crofters, or has man been 
warned off by malaria or the tsetse-fly? If the next chapter of our 
study is the sustenance which the country offers to man, we find a great 
deal to discard in our old authorities, and much investigation to be 
undertaken with a fresh mind. In the matter of climate, for example, 
we must get rid of our smug statistics of average rainfall and mean 
temperature—among the most misleading data which pseudo-science 
has ever invented. The climate of the country which we are surveying 
will require a more intelligent, though not necessarily an elaborate, 
estimate. So with the soil, and the fertility of its different areas ; its 
irrigation if the rainfall needs supplementing, and the facilities for 
artificial irrigation. ‘Thence to the produce of the soil is an easy step, 
though here also discrimination is advisable. Rice may be grown which 
the indigenes can eat, but which it would be useless to export because it 
is unsuitable for milling ; or cotton which its growers can use, but with 
so poor a staple that no manufacturing country will look at it. The 
agricultural output as a whole needs more sympathetic treatment than 
our text-books often give it. ‘The same may be said about the mineral 
products, especially coal ; and the careful student will watch the opening 
for the development of electrical energy, which we must continue to get 
from either fuel or water until Faraday’s great-great-disciples discover 
how to extract it from sunbeams or the circumambient ether. Another 
step takes us to the manufacturing features of the country. What are 
its industrial centres? To what extent are its manufactures rooted in 
the soil, or due to other special causes, or merely fortuitous ? It will be 
increasingly important to discriminate between industries with definite 
local advantages (like shipbuilding on the Clyde) and industries at the 
mercy of foreign competition (like jute in Dundee, and now cotton in 
Lancashire). Is the necessary labour available among the adjacent 
population ; are wages high or low ; can labour be imported if required ? 
Finally, how does nature help or hinder the marketing of the 
output ? 
The last question brings up the whole problem of transport, the third 
point of view from which the geography of the country has to be studied ; 
and here the co-operation of nature and man has a sphere particularly 
its own ; especially in the navigation of great rivers, a subject on which 
the ordinary reader is often profoundly ignorant. Whether nature co- 
operated, or was defeated, in the matter of the Suez and Panama canals, 
is little more than a dialectic point. ‘The important fact is that transport 
is (as indeed it always has been) in a state of transition ; the advantages 
E2 
