September 25^ 1914] 



SCIENCE 



435 



Yet we have at tMs moment a renewal of 

 the scheme for a Channel tunnel, and at 

 this moment men are flying from England 

 to France and France to England. Suppose 

 the Channel tunnel to be made; suppose 

 flying to be improved — and it is improving 

 every day — ^what will become of the island ? 

 What will become of the sea 1 They will be 

 there and will be shown on the map, but 

 to all human intents and purposes the 

 geography will be changed. The sea will 

 no longer be a barrier, it will no longer be 

 the only high-road from England to 

 France. There will be going to and fro on 

 or in dry land, and going to and fro neither 

 on land nor on sea. Suppose this science 

 of aviation to make great strides, and 

 heavy loads to be carried in the air, what 

 will become of the ports, and what will be- 

 come of sea-going peoples? The ports will 

 be there, appearing as now on the map, but 

 Birmingham goods will be shipped at Bir- 

 mingham for foreign parts, and Lithgow 

 will export mineral direct, saying good-bye 

 to the Blue Mountains and even to Sydney 

 harbor. 



Now, in saying this I may well be told by 

 my scientific colleagues that it is all very 

 well as a pretty piece of fooling, but that it 

 is not business. I say it as an unscientific 

 man with a profound belief in the limitless 

 possibilities of science. How long is it since 

 it was an axiom that, as a lump of iron 

 sinks in water, a ship made of iron could 

 not possibly float ? Is it fatuous to contem- 

 plate that the conquest of the air, which is 

 now beginning, will make it a highway for 

 commercial purposes ? We have aeroplanes 

 already which settle on the water and rise 

 again ; we are following on the track of the 

 gulls which we wonder at far away in the 

 limitless waste of ocean. A century and a 

 half ago the great Edmund Burke ridiculed 

 the idea of representatives of the old North 

 American colonies sitting in the Imperial 



Parliament; he spoke of any such scheme 

 as fighting with nature and conquering the 

 order of Providence ; he took the distance, 

 the time which would be involved — sis 

 weeks from the present United States to 

 London. If any one had told him that what 

 is happening now through the applied 

 forces of science might happen, he would 

 have called him a madman. Men think in 

 years, or at most in lifetimes; they ought 

 sometimes to think in centuries. I believe 

 in Reclus's words, "All man has hitherto 

 done is a trifle in comparison with what he 

 will be able to effect in future. ' ' Science is 

 like a woman. She says no again and again, 

 but means yes in the end. 



In dealing with land and water I have 

 touched upon natural divisions and natural 

 boundaries, which are one of the provinces 

 of geography. Flying gives the go-by to all 

 natural divisions and boundaries, even the 

 sea; but let us come down to the earth. 

 Isthmuses are natural divisions between 

 seas ; the ship canals cut them and link the 

 seas — ^the canal through the Isthmus of Cor- 

 inth, the canal which cuts the Isthmus of 

 Perekop between the Crimea and the main- 

 land of Eussia, the Baltic Canal, the Suez 

 Canal, the Panama Canal. The Suez Canal, 

 it will be noted, though not such a wonder- 

 ful feat as the Panama Canal, is more im- 

 portant from a geographical point of view, 

 in that an open cut has been made from sea 

 to sea without necessity for locks, which 

 surmount the land barrier but more or less 

 leave it standing. Inland, what are natural 

 divisions 1 Mountains, forests, deserts, and, 

 to some extent, rivers. Take mountains. 

 ' ' High, massive mountain systems, ' ' writes 

 Miss Semple, ' ' present the most effective bar- 

 riers which man meets on the land surface 

 of the earth." But are the Rocky Moun- 

 tains, for instance, boundaries, dividing 

 lines, to anything like the extent that they 

 were now that railways go through and 



