108 International Geographic Conference. 



Prior to the discovery of America, all the humbugs of the 

 world gathered under the skirts of religion. 'If any man had a 

 nostrum which he wished to vend or a doctrine which he wished 

 to inculcate, he claimed that it was a revelation from heaven. 

 Somehow or other the discovery of America changed all that. 

 Up to that time the people of the world had not believed the 

 earth to be round. Here and there a scholar believed it, but 

 the teachings of scientific men and scholars had but little effect 

 on the world at large. When Columbus proved by sailing across 

 the sea that the earth is actually round, that it is in fact a globe, 

 so that the great multitude of people themselves came at last to 

 believe it, it made science respectable ; and when the feat of 

 Columbus had the effect of making science respectable, people 

 came ultimately to place on the shoulders of science the respon- 

 sibility for all the humbugs of the world. If a man now has a 

 wonderful nostrum which he wishes to vend, he does not say it 

 was revealed to him by heaven, but it Avas taught to him by sci- 

 ence ; if a man wants to bombard the heavens for rain, it is 

 scientific to do it ; if a man wants to recover the lost rivers of 

 the arid regions, he has some scientific theory on which to do 

 that work. So science has come at last to be the bolster and the 

 foundation of very many of the humbugs of the world. 



That is not all. Science has gone forward to accomplish 

 something, and since the time of Columbus science has accom- 

 plished much in the great field of geography. The earth has 

 three envelopes, movable, ever-changeable, moving vertically 

 and moving horizontally. There is one envelope of air, another 

 of water, and another of rock. These three envelopes are chang- 

 ing their positions, moving back and forth over the surface of 

 the earth horizontally, and rising and falling forever; three 

 great classes of movements are discovered on the surface of the 

 earth — one in the air, one in the water, and one in the rocks 

 themselves. We study the movements of the atmosphere in 

 modern scientific geography, and have learned much about 

 them. Your president has to-day learnedly placed* before j^ou 

 some most interesting results of scientific investigations in rela- 

 tion to the movements of the atmosphere and the movement of 

 the waters of the earth. As the winds blow about tiie earth, 

 and the air rolls in vertical movements, storms gather and hur- 

 ricanes blow here and there, and thus we find that the whole 

 aerial envelope is forever in motion. In a similar manner the 

 watery envelope is forever in motion ; it is not alone moving in 



