700 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts, and Letters. 
of the past must be economic.” This point of view has 
often been promulgated since and is held by many. One 
historical student writes, “Few, if any, historians would 
agree that everything can be explained economically, as 
many of the socialists and some economists of good standing 
would have us believe”; “But in the sober and chastened 
form in which most economists now accept the doctrine, it 
serves to explain far more of the phenomena of the past than 
any other single explanation ever offered.” After such a 
statement as this, it is refreshing to read the words of one of 
the leading economic historians, Werner Sombart, who de¬ 
clares that the economic interpretation of history is no more 
true and no more false than any other single point of view in 
the interpretation of history. With this we will gladly 
agree. 
Those who seek to explain history by geographical or 
physiographic factors are also, to some extent, imitators of 
Buckle, although Michelet has been far more influential in 
emphasizing the importance of geography in history. In 
the hands of masters the physiographic interpretation has 
added largely to our knowledge of the course of history, and 
no historian now would neglect the study of geography. 
Unfortunately some of the enthusiasts in this country have 
been led into exaggerations; so that there have been battles 
royal in which Professor Burr of Cornell has been the pro¬ 
tagonist for history. He answers some of the exaggerations 
in the following passage: “When the historian Buckle sought 
to reduce all history to geoography and maintained that 
civilization must begin where facility of nourishment leaves 
most ample leisure, it was the great geographer, Oscar 
Peschel, who exclaimed against the wildness of his reason¬ 
ing, and who pointed out that there is a land (New Guinea) 
where there exists a plant (the sago palm) which is almost 
solid nutriment, and where the labor of a man can in one day 
win him food for eighteen, leaving him the other seventeen 
for the development of the civilization in which the Papuans 
should accordingly have led the world. It was another great 
geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, who organized into the new 
science of anthropo-geography what Mr. Buckle sought to 
make the basis of history, and protested that in this science 
one must never speak of geographic necessity, but only of 
