434 
The Ohio Naturalist. 
[Vol. VI, No. 3, 
pupils. Just as nature study introduces the plant and animal 
kingdoms to the child and high school zoology and botany con- 
tinue to familiarize him with them, so as to pave the way for 
college and university research into the fundamental principles 
of the sciences of zoology and botany ; so nature study, and 
subsequently, geography and physiography supply basal con- 
ceptions for the extended quest for knowledge in the separate 
sciences of our subject. 
We are now prepared for a brief treatment of the third division 
of the subject, ‘‘their essential fields.” We have gone far 
enough already to begin to see the scope of each. Physiography 
describes, classifies, and discusses the origin of the features of 
the earth. It compares similar and dissimilar, related and 
unrelated forms always seeking to reduce the multitudinous 
variety to a system, to group likes and correlate related speci- 
mens. It concerns itself with the physiographic processes and 
forces of the earth, air, and sea and endeavors to explain all the 
workings of all, and to understand the nature of all physio- 
graphic features. Such a field and purpose constitute physi- 
ography a science. They proclaim it to have problems, easy 
and hard, short and long, solved and unsolved, and I may say, 
solvable and unsolvable. All this means, further, that the ele- 
mentarv introduction, which the high school boy receives, to the 
general subject does not acquaint him with the science. It only 
puts him in touch with some of its facts and theories, and 
enables him to see and work out for himself, other truths; or to 
pursue the subject more at length in the University. 
And geography possesses a field more biotic, anthropic, and 
industrial but centering in the relation of the anthropic phenom- 
ena to the physiographic. Its seeks to discover all responses of 
mankind to his physical environment ; to show how human 
industries are related to the distribution of natural resources 
and to the facilities for moving and marketing them; to show 
whv man lives where he does and as he does so far as these 
depend upon the physiographic, climatic, and geographic con- 
ditions or upon the distributions of natural features or phenom- 
ena; to trace his institutions, the elements of his character and 
the nature of his aspirations as far as they are related to the 
physical surroundings; and, having accummulated all these data, 
to reduce them to systems, and to organize them into laws and 
principles. Geographers have been working in this field for two 
milleniums and a vast body of material has been collected. 
Much of the material has been classified; laws have been found, 
j)rinciples discovered, and, today, one of the oldest of sciences is 
again finding itself. 
Here, too, only beginnings are mastered in the elementary 
schools. In subject matter, both quality and quantity, and in 
