GrUYOT on Carl Bitter. 27 



Humboldt, his own work would have been impossible. But 

 that very declaration shows that the work that he himself con- 

 ceived and virtually performed, was still another than that 

 attempted by Humboldt. For him the full knowledge of the 

 physical globe, grand as it is in itself, is but a means, not an 

 end. Our planet is a living organization which comprises the 

 life of mankind. The central idea of the "Erdkunde," there- 

 fore, the inward principle upon which it rests, the principle of 

 order which binds together all its parts, is that of a vital union 

 of nature and of man into an organic unity. Its main task 

 is the study of the unceasing, ever-renewed, and varied mutual 

 action of these two factors. That idea must be clearly appre- 

 hended and well denned ; it must be seized in its fruitful 

 applications, in its rich consequences, before one can justly 

 appreciate its full value, and understand the profound revolu- 

 tion that it has effected. Such a true appreciation alone will 

 account for the vast influence that Eitter exerted upon his 

 age, and for the fact that all thinking Germany dates, from the 

 appearance of the "Erdhunde," the emancipation of Geogra- 

 phy as an independent science, in the high sense of the term, 

 possessed since of a principle of its own, and which takes its 

 rank side by side with its sister science, the Philosophy of 

 History. 



You will agree with me, gentlemen, when I say that, great 

 and well deserved as is Bitter's reputation in this country, it 

 is — as all great reputations, indeed, but perhaps more so than 

 usual — one resting upon authority. It is, if I may be allowed 

 the expression, an imported one ; and this, indeed, is not sur- 

 prising; and we could scarcely speak otherwise of England, 

 and still more of France. Ritter's theoretical ideas and 

 methods are to be taken from a few academic memoirs, but 

 more especially from his great work itself. There we find 

 them realized in the rich, concrete forms of life. They never 

 have been reduced by him into a regular abstract system or 

 doctrine, a form altogether uncongenial to a mind which was 

 so thoroughly filled with the vivid images of nature. These 

 channels, together with his suggestive lectures to thousands of 

 students during the long period of his public teaching, were 

 sufficient to spread his spirit in Germany. But they are not 

 so for foreign countries. The original memoirs just mentioned, 

 though since published separately, are not of easy access. 

 The very bulk of his main work has prevented, thus far, a 

 translation of it into foreign languages, except, strange to say, 

 one into the Bussian, and a very partial one into the French, 



