SECTION E.— GEOGRAPHY. 



MAPPING OF THE COLONIAL 

 EMPIRE 



ADDRESS BY 



BRIGADIER H. S. L. WINTERBOTHAM, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION 



It seems ridiculous, from this chair, to begin with cycles and waves. 

 Yet I feel compelled to do so. We, as geographers, owe our own progress 

 very largely to the innumerable impulses recorded by the advances of 

 other sciences, and of other branches of knowledge. Their wave-lengths 

 of progress — their cycles of advance and research — may be different from 

 ours, but none the less geography is, at once, their debtor and their catalyst. 

 Our environment is both physical and human. Our analysis and our 

 correlations are at fault if we do not study and profit from any advance 

 in the knowledge of environment, and man's reaction to it. No new find 

 at Babylon or in the Tombs of the Kings but adds to our bill of fare. 

 We wait upon the explanation of climatic changes in Greenland as eagerly 

 as does Geodesist or Geologist, and we find trade cycles as important as 

 those of sunspots. It is a fact that the study of man's reaction to his 

 environment is so wide that we must draw our raw material from all sides 

 and from all authorities. Our progress is, in large measure, dictated by 

 theirs. 



In one important particular, however, geography, in the original sense 

 of that difficult word, provides its own raw material. To take proper 

 stock of our world we must map it. A globe, a map, a plan, a chart — 

 these are not only records of our physical environment, but provide the 

 background against which all other factors may be shown. My dis- 

 tinguished predecessor in this chair, pointing out that most of us are still 

 immobile in this world of ours, said that we still have to take our im- 

 pressions of regions other than our own from picture or narrative. No 

 doubt that is true. We may get an impression of the Highlands of 

 Scotland from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley amplified by the attractive 

 advertisements of sundry hydropathics. 



But if we want the facts we turn to the i-inch map, the geological map, 

 the agricultural atlas and the population map. Later on, in his interesting 



