THE 
National Geographic Magazine 
Yol. VII JANUARY, 1896 No. 1 
INTRODUCTORY 
With the present number the National Geographic Magazine 
commences a new series and makes its first appearance as a 
monthly publication. What shall be its precise scope and func- 
tion has been the most difficult question its editors have been 
called upon to^ete^Tnine. From no other point of view is the in- 
terdependence of the sciences so manifest as from the geographic. 
Geography in its broader sense has to do not merely with the 
physical featured of the earth’s surface, but with the distribution 
of animal and vegetable life, with political divisions and subdi- 
visions, with the growth and movement of population, with the 
progress of human society, with the development of the earth’s 
natural resources, and with commercial intercourse between na- 
tions. To cover successfully so vast and so diversified a field is 
entirely beyond the capacity of any single periodical publication. 
Either it must restrict itself to physical geography and become 
largely technical, or it must content itself with briefly chronicling 
the more notable additions to geographic knowledge in those 
parts of the world in which its readers are less directly interested, 
and with becoming more especially tlie exponent of the geogra- 
ph}^ — physical, political, and commercial — of the continent with 
which its pul)lication more particularly identifies it. And surely 
in the case of an American publication tins is a sufficient!}'' broad 
field. There are vast regions of the New World that must con- 
tinue to tempt the venturesome explorer for many years to come. 
Here, too, on this continent “ the rudiments of empire are,” in the 
words of one of our own poets, “ plastic yet and warm })olitical 
Ijrohlems are being wrought out on an unexami)led scale, a fusion 
of races hitherto without i)arallel is going on, and the bounty of 
nature is being {)Oured out with a more lavish hand than in any 
other equally e.xtensive [)ortion of the globe. It will accordingly 
