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SCIENCE. 



[X. S. Vol. XIX. No. 474. 



ber of well-defined types will be the nat- 

 ural development of an adequate geo- 

 graphical terminology. When review is 

 made of modern geographical articles it is 

 curious and significant to find only a small 

 addition to the school-boy list of technical 

 terms. This is not true of any subject that 

 is cultivated in the universities as well as 

 in the schools. It is a reproach to geog- 

 raphy that the results of mature observa- 

 tion are so generally described in the inade- 

 quate terms of immature study; this re- 

 proach will have the less ground the more 

 thoroughly ■ systematic geography is stud- 

 ied. With the development of more ma- 

 ture methods of description there may 

 come a larger share of attention to the 

 thing described, and thus a relative de- 

 crease of attention to matters of merely 

 personal narrative. I do not wish to lessen 

 the number of entertaining books of travel 

 which now fill many of the shelves in libra- 

 ries called geographical, but it would be a 

 great satisfaction to see the standard works 

 of geographical libraries given a more ob- 

 jective quality, so that they might compare 

 favorably with the standard works of geo- 

 logical or botanical libraries, in which the 

 element of personal narrative is reduced to 

 its properly subordinate place. 



Another step of equal importance with 

 the establishment of geographical types is 

 the change from the empirical to the ex- 

 planatory or rational or genetic method of 

 treating the elemental facts that enter into 

 geographical relationships. The rational 

 method has long been pursued in regard to 

 the facts of the atmosphere and the ocean ; 

 it is coming to be adopted for facts con- 

 cerning the lands; and since the adoption 

 of an evolutionary philosophy, the evolu- 

 tionary explanation of the organic items of 

 geography may replace the teleological 

 treatment that obtained in Ritter's time. 

 It is, however, very seldom the case that 

 geographers adopt the rational method 



consciously and fully ; hence special atten- 

 tion to this phase of the theoretical side of 

 geography may be strongly urged. It may 

 be noted in this connection that the appli- 

 cation of the explanatory method has been 

 so lately made to the treatment of land 

 forms that the geographer may for the 

 present make himself to his advantage 

 something of a specialist in this branch of 

 the subject. It should be added that, so 

 long as he studies land forms in order bet- 

 ter to understand the environment in 

 which living things find themselves, he re- 

 mains a geographer and does not become a 

 geologist. There is a needless confusion in 

 this matter, which may, perhaps, be les- 

 sened if its untangling be illustrated by 

 the following geological comparison. 



For some decades past a new method of 

 ti'eatment has been applied to the study of 

 rocks, greatly to the advantage of geolo- 

 gists. The method requires a good knowl- 

 edge of inorganic chemistry and of optical 

 physics, and the geologists who have spe- 

 cialized in the study of rocks have had to 

 make themselves experts in these phases of 

 physics and chemistry ; but they are not 

 for that reason classified as physicists or 

 chemists. They remain geologists, though 

 sometimes taking the special title of pe- 

 trographer. So with the geographer who 

 specializes in the study of land forms; he 

 must make himself familiar with certain 

 phases of geology, but he does not, there- 

 fore, become a geologist; he remains a 

 geographer. His object is not tO discover 

 for their own sake the past stages through 

 which existing land forms have been devel- 

 oped ; he studies past forms only in order 

 to extend his knowledge of systematic phys- 

 iography and thus to increase his appre- 

 ciation of existing forms. As far as he 

 studies the sequence of past forms he is 

 studying a phase of geology, just as the 

 geologist who examines existing arrange- 

 ments of climate, of oceanic circulation, or 



