MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
23 
MAN IN WEST NORWAY. 
If we can answer the question where in the world something is, we are 
talking geography. If we can tell why these people are there, why more 
numerous than elsewhere, why more happy or more wretched, we may be 
talking geography or we may be talking history. The conscious and pur- 
poseful activities of men, Prof. Burr tells us, belong to history, leaving their 
vieldings to environment and their driftings with the current for geography. 
I am not attempting to define my science but to illustrate its bearings by 
a concrete example. 
On the old continent of Europe man has densely populated those regions 
that he has found favorable to his prosperity. He has not always displayed 
especial intelligence in selecting these spots; he has groped about somewhat, 
now settling on lands that looked promising to him, now wresting their homes 
from prosperous-seeming predecessors. He has made mistakes which nature 
has explained to him by gently withholding her bounty. But after many 
centuries of trial and contention he has doubtless come to inhabit the most 
suitable parts of the continent in greatest numbers. 
Now in Norway precisely we find men spread out thinner than anywhere 
else in Europe. For Norway, larger than all Great Britain and Ireland, 
has barely a twentieth as many inhabitants. Our young state of Michigan 
with only half the area already has more people. The Norwegians are really 
so few that the part they have played in history, the contribution they have 
made to human development and culture is somewhat astonishing in a bare 
two million of people. The sea was always in the story for they came to 
their land by sea, by sea they moved about it of old and still today, by sea 
they wandered along every European shore, wresting territory they named 
Norman from the French king and centuries of spoils from the British island- 
ers. even anticipating in their restless cruising the great exploit of Columbus. 
Today, though fewer than any European people they are fourth in world- 
rank as owners of merchant ships. In their own continent only England 
and Germany lead them. Whatever springs' of racial, social or historic 
character may have contributed to so much of achievement, I see here the 
influence of an inhospitable land to which its dwellers only cling with diffi- 
culty. 
Modern geography sees nothing in the Renaissance so fruitful of human 
culture and progress as the recognition of the ocean as man’s highway. That 
was the gift of Columbus to his fellow men. That the world was round was 
known in Plato’s day. That a voyage due west from the straits of Gibraltar 
would bring a ship in time to India had been written down for nearly twenty 
centuries. But that man could break away from the land and sail straight 
away to the ends of the earth was a view that began to dawn on men with 
Columbus’ voyage. Beginnings of culture had already come to the races 
that had learned to move about the Mediterranean, groping always from 
point to point. Not that man voyaged for culture in those days. It was 
dominion, power and wealth that was sought, the neighbor’s goods taken 
with the strong hand too often. Similar the quest of Norsemen in France 
and Britain, of Portuguese and Spanish in America. Once the overpowering 
fear of the ocean vastness was put aside it was a summer excursion, this 
