GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH IN THE UNITED STATES* 



By Gardiner G. Hubbard, LL. D., 



President of the National Geographic Society, 



AND 



Marcus Baker, 



U. S. Geological Survey 



The United States, now a little more than a century old, com- 

 prises an area of 3,600,000 square miles, an area a little greater 

 than that of Canada and a little less than that of Europe. From 

 easternmost Maine to westernmost Alaska it stretches through 

 120 degrees of longitude, or about one-third of the earth's cir- 

 cumference. Thus, in midsummer, sunrise in eastern Maine 

 occurs 20 minutes before sunset in westernmost Alaska. From 

 southernmost Florida, reaching to the verge of the torrid zone, 

 it stretches northward to northernmost Alaska, more than 300 

 miles within the Arctic circle, while in altitude it ranges from 

 200 or more feet below sea level in the deserts of southern Cali- 

 fornia to heights of more than 18,000 feet in Alaska. 



Beginning with the close of the war for independence, 114 years 

 ago, as 13 distinct and independent states stretching along the 

 Atlantic seaboard from New Hampshire to Georgia, we have first 

 a loose confederation of states which, speedil}'' breaking down, 

 was replaced by the present constitutional union of the people, 

 bound together in 45 sovereign states and 5 territories. In 1790 

 the 13 states had an area of about 350,000 square miles and a 

 population of a little less than 4,000,000. A century later its 

 area w^as nearly eleven times as great and its population about 

 seventeen times as great, or between 65 and 70 millions. 



Discovery of what is now the United States began just four 

 centuries ago this very year, when the Bristol merchant Cabot, 

 the first white man (after the Norsemen) to set foot on the Amer- 

 ican continent, antedating Columbus by fourteen months, landed 

 on the bleak coast of Labrador, and then cruised southward as 

 far as Virginia. This, like all discoveries, was only a beginning, 



*An address before the Geographical Section of the British Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science, at Toronto, August 23, 1897. 



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