August 4, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



133 



ought to have breathed an atmosphere of learn- 

 ing for a year or two. To be sure, a candidate 

 for a professorship in a college where the 

 teaching of geography is combined with the 

 teaching of another subject may make the other 

 subject his fii'st interest, and may not therefore 

 feel justified in carrying his geographical 

 preparation vei-y far. But it is encouraging to 

 see that geography is coming to be recognized 

 in more and more of our colleges as a subject 

 large enough and important enough to occupy 

 the whole of a professor's time. Young men 

 who have the ambition to be professors of 

 geography in colleges of that gi-ade should be 

 urged to take a doctor's degree in geography; 

 and to young men of that sort the Clark Grad- 

 uate School of Geography should be powerfully 

 attractive, if it is organized on the lines I have 

 indicated. 



Geographical Engineers 

 But there is an altogether different group of 

 positions for which young men will be increas- 

 ingly needed as the affairs of the world, now so 

 disordered, return to a more normal condition, 

 and as, in consequence of that return, interna- 

 tional commerce comes to flourish again, par- 

 ticularly those branches of international com- 

 merce which have to do with the less known con- 

 tinents of South America, Africa and Asia. At 

 that time, which we may hope will not be too 

 long delayed, many of our larger commercial 

 houses will find, as some of the most enterprising 

 have already found, that they need much more 

 information than is ordinarily available regard- 

 ing the more distant parts of the world; and 

 they will learn that it is profitable to secure 

 that information from trained experts. In my 

 opinion the experts who can best give that sort 

 of information will be high grade geographers, 

 who have specialized in economic geography as 

 well as in the regional geography of one or an- 

 other continent. 



The Clark Graduate School of Geography 

 ought to make a specialty of training such men : 

 their specialty ought to be called geographical 

 engineering, and those who become proficient in 

 iit ought to receive the degree of geographical 

 engineer. Needless to add that training of that 

 kind must be based on a broad and fii-m foun- 

 dation of undergraduate studies in a well 



equipped college, and must be extended by con- 

 tinuing those studies in a thoroughgoing pro- 

 fessional School of Geography; and the train- 

 ing will need one other element, namely, after 

 the professional study is well advanced, a year 

 of studious travel in the continent selected for 

 special attention. For although the later work 

 of a geographical engineer must be largely of 

 so practical a nature as to satisfy the money- 

 making demands of commerce, the preparation 

 for that work can not be made by learning 

 definite answers to set questions. The problems 

 that the geographical engineer has to answer 

 will be as a rule so novel, so individual, that 

 his best training for them will be found first in 

 the comprehensive acquisition of all the funda- 

 mental knowledge in his specialtj', and second 

 in the original study of novel and individual 

 problems in the same specialty, that is, 

 research in economic geography. Hence even 

 for this most practical field of geographical 

 science, experts will be best made ready by 

 close association with older experts who are 

 carrying on researches in the same field. Men 

 who have received high-grade preparation of 

 that kind will be sought for and prized. 

 The Clark School a Center of Geogeaph- 

 icAL Activity 

 Can you not imagine the eagerness and 

 earnestness with which the students in a 

 Graduate School of Geography will pursue 

 their studies? They will be proud of their 

 association with a staff of research professors; 

 they will be devoted to their science and de- 

 lighted with the opportunity that the school 

 affords of advancing themselves in it ; they will 

 be ambitious to become proficient in the science 

 and to apply their proficiency to serious tasks 

 in the actual world. Can you not understand 

 also that the presence of such a Graduate 

 School of Geography in Worcester, with its 

 corps of expert professors, its well developed 

 material equipment, its body of enthusiastic 

 students and its exhilarating scholarly atmos- 

 phere, will attract intending and returning 

 travelers to visit it, to stay near it for a time, 

 and to establish more or less formal relations 

 with it? An intending traveler may well spend 

 several months under its influence while making 

 preparations for his journey; a returning trav- 



