INTRODUCTION.
The subject of these lectures is Geography in its most enlarged and comprehensive sense. It will be necessary to preface them with some general observations, which shall serve to indicate the scientific basis on which the discussion will rest. Our starting-point will be with Nature herself and not with arbitrary geographical systems hitherto constructed.
By the word Nature will be meant the entire Creation. The grasping of Nature in all its objects and all its forces becomes, in conjunction with the agency of Time and Space, the comprehension of a great system. The inanimate creation may be represented under the term inorganic, the animate creation under the term organic. Yet there is not an absolute contrast between them; for in both there is ceaseless progress, no pause, but in a higher and comprehensive sense a cosmical life, the whole forming one great Organism, in which the inorganic world, so called, is only the foundation on which the animate creation stands.
To us, our own Earth is the most marked feature of Nature viewed on its inorganic side. To us it is the planet best known of all, or rather the only one closely known, the point whence we draw conclusions on the whole Universe, the resting ground for the glass that searches the Kosmos, to use Humboldt’s word, discerning the place which the Earth holds in it, and prying into the mysteries of the entire creation. Our globe is one of the major planets of our system, all of which gird the sun with great elliptic orbits, midway in which is our own. There begins the first popular division of the planets,—those that are within and those which are without our own orbit. This is one of the most simple of discriminations, one which we inherit from the ancients in an unmodified form. Humboldt retains this primary classification.
The external planets are those whose orbits embrace that of the Earth within their own. The minor planets are those whose orbits are embraced by that of the Earth. These are Mercury and Venus.
The ancients, counting both the sun and moon, reckoned only seven planets. At the end of the eighteenth century another was added, Uranus, an external planet. Through the instrumentality of improved telescopes, soon after, four minor ones were discovered, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta; and by the still more perfect lenses recently introduced, and the assiduity and skill of astronomers, the number of these little planetary bodies, ranging between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, has grown great. Beyond Saturn and Uranus is Neptune, discovered mathematically by Le Verrier, in Paris, and seen by Galle in Berlin, the 23d of September, 1846.
To these (now eighty) planets may be added the twenty to thirty moons of our solar system, and a number of comets.
The middle position of the Earth’s orbit is not without its consequences. The distance of the Earth from the Sun is, in round numbers, 92,000,000 of miles, nearly three times as far as that of Mercury, the planet nearest the Sun. Jupiter, on the other hand, is five times as far from the Sun as the Earth; Uranus about nineteen times as far, and Neptune about thirty-three times as far.
The time of the Earth’s revolution around the Sun is also equally removed from the extremes; its year is 365 days; Mercury’s being 87 days; Jupiter’s 11 of our years; Uranus 84 years; and Neptune’s 165 years.
The daily revolution of the Earth on its axis is also of only medium swiftness, consuming 24 hours. This, of course, controls the periods of waking and sleep of the entire animate creation on our globe. Some planets revolve slower, some more rapidly than our own; Jupiter’s revolution, for example, is accomplished in little less than 10 hours. This extreme rapidity seems to account for the much greater flattening at the poles of the planets than the Earth exhibits, occasioned doubtless during the formation processes, while those immense revolving masses were passing from their primitive fluid state into the more rigid forms in which we know them. Of all the planets, however, the Earth has most perfectly retained the spherical shape; and the spherical form is in one sense a medium form; i.e. it is removed from all extremes of angularity, and so falls in with the analogies which I am endeavoring to establish, springing fromthe position of the Earth’s orbitmidwaybetween those of the inner and outer planets. According to Plato, the beauty of form lies in symmetry, and our Earth is the most symmetrical of planets, and, unquestionably, the spherical shape is the one best adapted to the display of the largest number of phenomena possible.
The variations from the spherical form, produced by elevations and depressions, are only of medium magnitude in our globe compared with many others in our system. On the smaller planet of Venus, for example, the mountains are thought to rise to a height of many miles, while five is the greatest altitude of ours. According to Mädler’s conjectures, the mountains in our own moon rise to a height of over three miles, an altitude altogether out of proportion to the size of the moon as compared with the earth.
In respect to the number of its moons, too, our Earth is no extremist; it has but one: other planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, have none. On the other hand, Jupiter has 4, Saturn 7, Uranus 6 at least, and doubtless more. The general law seems to be, the farther from the Sun the greater the number of moons; perhaps in the wonderful providence of God, to compensate the feeble light of those distant realms by the number of the reflecting bodies.
Now, summing up all that has been said, it will be seen that the Earth is equally far removed from every extreme. This fundamental classification, drawn from the place of its orbit in relation to those nearer the Sun or more distant from it, gives it a character which is felt and seen in many different things, and responds to analogies which it is not incorrect to mark. Amediumis seen in all its attributes and relations: it is neither the largest nor the smallest of planets; neither the swiftest nor the slowest; neither the warmest nor the coldest; in nothing is it either at a minimum nor at a maximum point. And this very medium character brings the Earth into harmony with the system of which it forms a part; the symmetry of the one corresponding with the symmetry of the other, and specially fits it to become the temporary home of a race like ours, which makes the whole surface of the globe tributary during the short terrestrial life of man to his preparation for a celestial state of being. Our globe is certainly the only one of our system which could possibly be inhabited by man; and as his residence, and as the arena for his culture, it is worthy of being studied in all its features; no point is too trifling to be overlooked.
As man looks for a center to the system whichevidentlypertains to him, and in which our Earth plays no slight part, the Sun is clearly the source of a large share of what makes our life desirable. Thence we receive light, warmth, and indirectly, and yet directly too, life and the bloom of health. Nor can men, even if ignorant and degraded,helpseeing the relation of the Sun to the Earth, and linking, in their rude thoughts, the heavens with the earth; and hence, before all higher Revelation, the worship of the Sun has been the primitive instinct of the oldest of nations.
Looking at the earth as simply one among the innumerable hosts of heaven, it, like each one of them, becomes to the imagination a mere point of light, a “star among stars.” But, when we shift our point of view, and leaving the cosmical or universal for the special, for what pertains to the individual life, the mere point of light flames up into a great, busy world, full of phenomena demanding investigation and thought. And yet this world, so attractive in its multiplicity of details, is almost a chaos at the first sight; a confused and inextricable mass, so large, so high, so deep as to defy human effort to compass or master it. Science alone, the gift and the growth of centuries, can measure the field; science alone can enter it and reduce the chaos to a beautiful and orderly grouping, and make a perfect picture of the whole; it alone can dispel crude ideas and give truer ones in their stead. To the rude dweller on the plain, the earth seems a gigantic floor, as it did to many a tribe in the past, and as it does to-day to thousands of wondering Arabs. The South Sea Islander, in the Pacific, takes his island or island group to be the whole earth; the world he considers an endless ocean plain, from which the Sun arises, and, when the day is over, into which it sinks. And even within the pale of civilization itself, the ignorant Neapolitan lazzarone considers his gulf the center of the world.
As men advance in their inquiries, and, ascending the sides of mountains, look out over a larger tract, or find new lands across the seas, they do not outgrow their first idea, the world merely expands from the narrow homestead to a larger circle, such as the Romans used to call their orbis terrarum. The conception of the earth as a vast, unsupported ball, careering through the heavens, was the possession, slowly won, of such great minds as Pythagoras and Aristotle, and slowly found its way among the ideas whichwhole nations accepted as true. Circumnavigators must sail around the globe and tell their story to the world before the conjectures of science could have real weight with the popular mind in a matter so remote from the crude speculations of the ignorant as this. And less than one century and a half ago (in 1727) another step was taken, and the theory was propounded by Newton, that the Earth is a spheroid and not a perfect sphere. Later investigations have determined that the spheroidal form is only an approximation to perfect accuracy, and that the Earth is a polyhedron, whose exact number of zodes has not yet been determined, and which may prove indeterminable. Bessel has assigned, as the great task of science for the coming century, to settle this question with perfect exactness. But what has been said is enough to indicate that in our knowledge, at present, certainly there is only progress, only approximation, no absolute exhaustion of the processes of discovery.
And just as in ruder lands each man looks at his own island, or village, as the center of the earth’s circle, so the ancients looked at the earth as the pivot of the universe, the central point around which all the heavenly hosts revolve. That was the fundamental principle of that Ptolemaic system which was older than Ptolemy; held in the most ancient times in Arabia, Babylon, Persia, and India, but first luminously expanded in the proportions and with the dignity of a system by Ptolemy. Its outlines were, in one word, this: there are seven planets, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; each has its own orbit, in which it is in a limited sense supreme, but they all revolve around the common center, the Earth. Beyond the seven, and including them all, is the Firmament, in which the other stars stand like golden nails in an imperishable floor; the whole vast external Firmament is opaque and motionless.
The Ptolemaic system won and held the greatest regard in the ancient world. Mohammed established it in the Koran as a truth of religion. The advance of science revealed the falseness of the Ptolemaic scheme of the universe, and demonstrated the fact that the stars of heaven are not mere torch-bearers for us, and mere interpreters of human destinies, but are worlds like our own, our earth being but one of numberless thousands equally worthy of the Common Creator. The Copernican system, which was to re-create the whole domain of science, wrought this great change. TheSun, according to this theory, forms the central point around which, and not around the Earth, all the planets wheel. Copernicus, in 1543, left this imperfect and yet fruitful conception to his successors to unfold; and in the results gained by Kepler, in 1631, by Newton and Galileo, 1727, the Copernican system was firmly established. The vast improvements in the telescope removed the limits of the visible universe to a place till then unrevealed, and added inexhaustible fields to those which had been known before. The number of the planets was enlarged. The list of determined comets increases yearly. The number of the fixed stars has been determined by the extreme accuracy of such observers as Lalande, Lacaille, Bessel, Argelander, and Lamont. The great work of mapping and cataloguing the heavens has been accomplished. Many hundred stars, supposed to be single fixed stars, have been ascertained to be double stars, and some have been resolved into systems like our own. The 300-400, observed by Struve, have grown, through the labors of Herschel, in both the Northern and the Southern hemispheres, at the Cape of Good Hope, and elsewhere, to over 3000, and the number is constantly increasing. Nebulæ have been analyzed, and been shown to consist of worlds distinct and perfect as our own. Thus there is a steady and perceptible advance in man’s conception of the Earth, of Nature, of what we call the World and the Universe, though each individual, generation, and century are but dimly conscious of this progress.
The Earth draws our attention to itself, however, not as simply a unit in the planetary system, but as the home of the human race. The physical description of the globe includes the relations of the Earth as a star amid the heavenly hosts, while Geography, taken most comprehensively, regards the Earth as the dwelling-place of Man. From a geographical point of view, the world becomes to us the common home of our race, the theater, not of the operations of Nature in the most unrestricted sense, but the arena for the development of human life and history. The whole animate and inanimate creation is tributary, looked at geographically, to the fashioning of the destiny of Man. Without Man as the central point, Nature would have no interest to the geographer; without the Earth, constituted just as it is, the races of men and the course ofhuman history could not claim his attention. The Earth is not only the best known of planets, but, as the home of man, infinitely the most interesting. The study of it is at the foundation of history as much as of physics.
No man of science can fail to regard it with the deepest interest.
More than a hundred years ago, George Foster remarked that European culture had ascended to that height, that it must include an intimate knowledge of all that is peculiar in the features and phenomena of the entire globe. How much more true is this remark in the middle of our nineteenth century! It is no longer European culture that demands this, but the welfare of all countries claims of scholars this knowledge far more imperatively than a hundred years ago. Still, it must be confessed that we are far from the attainment of a perfect science of Geography, in its largest sense; the science which regards the Earth as the field of human discipline; the science of which what was formerly called Geography is only an outlying, rudimentary part. The compass of what it holds as its goal is too large, and its contents too varied forhisgrasp whose existence is hemmed in by narrow bonds, and whose life is so brief. And though there have always been detailed descriptions of the different parts of the earth, many of them remarkable for their accuracy, yet there has been lacking a knowledge of the principle of organic unity which pervades the whole, and the mutual play and interdependency of all the parts. The whole subject ofrelationswas unstudied. And it is a knowledge of the relations of things that leads to a scientific interpretation, not the description of detached parts. Geography was and continued to be mere description, not the teaching of the most important relations. Only now are we beginning to comprehend the true elements of geographical science, only now are the first efforts made to deal profoundly with this science, although the progress of discovery is still going on with unabated speed, leaving far behind us all the advances of our predecessors.
The Earth, consideredper se, is only a fragment of the Universe, of the Kosmos, in that wide use of the word which Humboldt has given to it in his celebrated work. The Earth is the grand floor, so to speak, of Nature; the home, or rather the cradle, of men and ofnations, the dwelling-place of our race. It is not merely a region of immense spaces, a vast superficies, it is the theater where all the forces of Nature and the laws of Nature are displayed in their variety and independencies. Besides this, it is the field of all human effort, and the scene of a Divine revelation. The Earth must be studied, therefore, in a threefold relation: to the Universe, to Nature, to History.
And it is not only as a mere passive agent, but active, that it assumes this threefold relation. It is an inseparable, an integral, a working member in the great system of things. But higher than this, and grander than its relation to the system ofthings, is its relation to an unseen world, to an unseen hand, even that of the Creator. We view it not as the field of forces and laws and phenomena, but the crowning gift of God, displaying the tokens of perfect adaptation to our wants, full of beauty and excellence—a revelation of Divine wisdom, in the form of a visible world. How beautifully has the inspired David painted this in the 104th Psalm!
In relation to its inhabitants, crowned with the Imperial gift of reason, the Earth is not merely the place where they may stand, the cradle where they may sleep, the home where they may live, it is the school where they may be trained. This is one of the first and one of the greatest lessons that we learn from the history of the race. The Earth finds its highest mission, not in its relation to inanimate nature, but to the world of intelligence—the minds that dwell upon it, the spiritual world to which it gives bodies. And as the Earth alone of the planets is adapted to be the home of such a being as man, so in our world of animate and inanimate things, man alone partakes of a moral nature, incapable of being shared or even imitated by the lower creatures. The Earth was made to be the home of mind, soul, character. And Man was created to make this earth tributary to his largest growth in mind, and soul, and character. In this sense the Earth and its noble possessors are correlative. Each individual rises to his own appointed work, runs his own course, uses all the appliances of Nature, all the help with which God invests him, and then ceases from his mission here; but the Earth remains, the home of the advancing millions, helping them all onward, and granting them new power to fulfill the noble purposes of human life.
Nor can this constitution of things be the result of a happy accident.Evidently under the supreme power of a Divine mind and will, Nature is made subservient to Man. That mutual working and interdependence of things, which opens to our comprehension the History of our race, cannot be ascribed to a fortuitous combination of events. It can only be the result of Divine Providence. Had there been no wise ruling of the blind forces of nature, no subjection of the rough, unbridled powers of the air, and sea, and earth, the human race would have become extinct, as so many races of beasts have done. But there are no traces of the extinction of a human race in our Paleontology. The constitution of the globe is incontestably coincident with a plan to preserve and perfect Man. There are destructive agencies, it is true, but they do not operate on an extended scale; our earthquakes, and volcanoes, and great storms at sea affect but a fraction of the race, they are no longer universal in their action; while, on the contrary, the instrumentalities which favor mankind remain in force—the earth’s changeless garment of green, the uniform progress of generation among subordinate creatures, the ease of acclimatization, and of transferring seeds and germs, with undiminished fruitfulness, from one region to another. The very agencies which, in the dawn of history, brought death, have been changed to auxiliaries of life with us to-day.
The investigation into the relations of the Earth, in this respect, and into the organization of all the natural laws and phenomena in their bearing on man, his life and history, must constitute a prominent department of true geographical science. When Geography ceases to be a lifeless aggregate of unorganized facts, and becomes the science which deals with the earth as a true organization, a world capable of constant development, carrying in its own bosom the seeds of the future, to germinate and unfold, age after age, it first attains the unity and wholeness of a science, and shows that it grows from a living root; it becomes capable of systematic exposition, and takes its true place in the circle of sister sciences. Philosophy gladly grants it a share in its own domain, and permits it to indulge in those soaring speculations, which it used to be thought that so simple a thing as Geography might not enjoy. Yet, it must not be denied that there has for some time been felt a need of bringing the earth, as an organization, more into the light of scientific investigation. The study of final causes, the tracing of infinitewisdom in the works of the Creator, the theories touching the first issue of all things, have grown out of this necessity. Many errors have, doubtless, drifted in during the course of these speculations; man has undertaken to measure the Divine plan with most imperfect data, and the illusion has been too fondly cherished of attaining final and profound results while men were scarcely in the possession of the elements of knowledge. It is for us, therefore, to enter upon our inquiries with investigation rather than theory, to test the knowledge of which tradition has put us in possession, and to advance, as we may, to the new and the unexplored.
Man is the first token that we meet, that our study of the earth must contemplate it as an organized whole, its unity consummating in him. As every individual must, in his own career, epitomize the history of the race, childhood, youth, manhood, and decrepitude, so each man mirrors in his own life the locality where he lives. Whether dwelling in the North or in the South, in the East or in the West, whether the shepherd of the Tyrolese Highlands, or the Hollander of the plains, every man is, in a manner, the representative of the home that gave him birth. In the people the country finds its reflection. The effect of the district upon the nature of its inhabitants in size and figure, in color and temperament, in speech and mental characteristics, is unmistakable. Hence the almost infinite diversity in the peculiarities of culture and attainment, as well as of tendency in different nations. Anthropology and Ethnography, the science of man and of race, are the running commentaries of Geography and Topography. The historian and the geographer work toward each other,—the historian going back from the acts of men to study the scenes which have conditioned their life, the geographer going forward from the study of the habitat of men to that of their deeds. The fundamental question of history is, in fact, What relation does the country bear to the national life? What relation to the civil structure, the state?
In fact, the whole constitution of Man is thoroughly connected with the Earth on which he dwells; the roots of his being run down into it in uncounted numbers. Man receives at birth from the earth not only a spiritual but a physical dowry, from which he cannot free himself, and of whose worth he becomes conscious more and more. It is, therefore, of course one of the first of the legitimate studies to learn the limits of the realm which Man makes his home, and tounderstand all its secrets, all its forces, so as to turn them to his own uses. Thus alone can he compass the sublime thought of his own freedom, the independence of his own will in the kingdom of Nature, and learn the majesty of his own spirit; for the knowledge of that freedom, which is the most noble of all God’s gifts to him, is the most direct key to the attainment of that place in the present, and that destiny in the future, which God has appointed for man. Without a preliminary training, amid the conditions of a limited life, can there be no step taken toward the enjoyment of the life without limitations which is to come. Without the capacity of breaking the higher law, there is no glory in obeying it, no freedom to be valued, even in the world of thought. There can be no true speculation, no philosophy of the unlimited and eternal, without inquiry into and knowledge of the limited and conditioned. He who knows not the earthly, cannot know the heavenly; he who knows not the finite, cannot know the infinite. Statement and counter-statement are the substance to the world of thought. Pythagoras investigated matters of number and weight, before he dealt with the mysteries of metaphysical speculation. Plato thought on the human soul, and the practical details of legislation, before he gave himself to the deepest things of Philosophy. Aristotle was a naturalist and physicist, before he became a logician and metaphysician. Kant was a mathematician and astronomer, before he dealt with the problems of transcendental science. Schelling went from natural philosophy to the study of the soul of things. If there have been evil results from this, it has not been from antedating metaphysical studies by physical, but by passing too quickly from the solid foundation-stones to the more unstable heights of the transcendental. Without these solid foundation-stones, philosophy falls, crushed by its own weight; but with this preparation, we may advance to the loftiest and yet most secure speculations.
Geography can just as little be contented with being a mere description of the Earth, and a catalogue of its divisions, as a detailed account of the objects in nature can take the place of a thorough and real natural history. The very word Geography, meaning a description of the Earth, has unfortunately been at fault, and has misled the world: to us it merely hints at the elements, thefactors of what is the true science of Geography. That science aims at nothing less than to embrace the most complete and the most cosmical view of the Earth; to sum up and organize into a beautiful unityallthat we know of the globe. The whole body of facts revealed by past and present discovery must be marshaled into harmony, before we gain the high pinnacle of Geographical Science. The Earth, in all its parts, must be known in all its relations, before we can speak of it as the scholars of our day ought to speak of the world they inhabit.
Moreover, the Earth is to be considered in two main relations—a relation, and an absolute relation; that is, we are to regard it in its connection with the greater whole, of which it forms a part, the Universe, and as a body standing alone, existing, as it were, for itself. It is the latter view which falls within the strict province of Geography. The very prominence of the old Greek word Γη indicates the pre-eminence which, in this science, our own planet, rather than others, receives.Ge-ography confines our attention to the Earth, and concentrates it upon the globe, regardedper se, rather than in its relations to the Universe. Taken, therefore, strictly, as already hinted at in the foregoing remark, Geography is the department of science that deals with the globe in all its features, phenomena, and relations, as an independent unit, and shows the connection of this unified whole with man and with man’s Creator. Should we go beyond this, and discuss the relations of the Earth to the Universe, (as is often done in our geographical treatises, in a singularly imperfect and unfruitful manner,) we should outrun the strict bounds of a single science, and should be encroaching on the domain of the sister science of astronomy. This we have no right to do. Yet, from time to time, we must borrow the results of other departments of learning to confirm our own. The field which we have to till has been immensely reduced in its proportions by the publication of “Kosmos,” which great work has almost exhausted the subject of the earth in its external relations. The limiting of our own department may, perhaps, give more opportunity for thorough investigation within itself.
The Earth, if discussed exhaustorily, must be spoken of in its relations to Time as well as to Space. The word by which we characterize it, in this regard, is History. The duration of the Earth outruns all measurement. By thinking of its beginning, isthe only way we have of gaining a conception of Time. We cannot conceive of the universe as antedating the creation of our earth. By this indefinite, not to say infinite, duration of time, the Earth is discriminated from all that it contains; it is older than any of its parts; it antedates all its kingdoms. The nature of the whole is, therefore, radically different from that of any of its divisions. The Earth has had a development of its own; hence the too common error of treating it as passive and inorganic. The history of the Earth displays, in all the monuments of the past, that it has been subjected in every feature, in every division of itself, to ceaseless transformation, in order to show that, as a whole, it is capable of that organic development on which I lay so much stress. The natural powers which the earth includes are constantly obedient to the mechanical laws of chemistry and physics. The animate creation, plants, animals, man, come and go, in accordance with the laws of their being, and as subordinate dependents on the great forces which the earth holds locked up within her bosom. The earth, the mother of them all, has her own special advance, her own development, to use that overburdened German word. She has relations to herself alone; not simply to organized forms, plants, and animals; just as little to organic things; not simply to her own countries, her rocks, and her crystals. These are but isolated parts; or, if not isolated, yet boundtogetherby a common tie. There is another tie above this; it is that which binds the earth to itself alone; that subordinates its parts to such an extent that they almost disappear. There is, above all this thought of parts, of features, of phenomena, the conception of the Earth as a whole, existing in itself, and for itself, an organic thing, advancing by growth, and becoming more and more perfect and beautiful. Without trying to impose on you anything vague and transcendental, I wish to lead you to view the globe as almost a living thing,—not a crystal, assuming new grace by virtue of an external law,—but a world, taking on grandeur and worth, by virtue of an inward necessity. The individuality of the earth must be the watchword of re-created Geography. To think of the Earth, as a seed sown from the hand of God himself on the great fields of space, and filled with a germinant power of life, which will transform it more and more, and make it more and more worthy of its noblest inhabitant, is the first, as it is the last, idea which we must take and keep in these inquiries.
Formerly, Geography was regarded as a mere auxiliary of History, Politics, Military Science, Natural History, the Industrial Arts, and Commerce. And in truth it does reach out and teach all these departments of knowledge and action; but only in the most recent times has it assumed the place of an independent branch of study. Only through the widening of the whole circle of sciences has room been made for this.
Geography used, for the sake of commerce, to be divided into three divisions: mathematical, physical, and political. This was at the time when it was thought that the whole frame-work of the sciences was a disjointed and sundered thing; before that minor principle of unity which binds them all together was recognized as one of the noblest conceptions that the mind can cherish. In the first two of these arbitrary divisions into which Geography was severed, the relations of astronomy, mathematics, and physics were studied, and their applications to the confused phenomena of the globe investigated. Yet the most important thing of all escaped notice; students overlooked their chief task, the tracing of causation and interdependence in the phenomena, and the relation of every one to the country which supplies its conditions of being. It was not suspected that each phenomenon was one link of a great chain of phenomena, the whole revealing a comprehensive law. Men discussed porphyritic formations, basaltic columns, hot springs, and a thousand features which dot the earth, and a thousand kinds of rock which rift the surface of the globe, and treated them singly as if each was a spore and the whole combination only a sporadic group. They did not discover that in the one feature was to be found the reason of the existence of its neighbor; that all the layers of stone owe their singularities of structure to one another rather than to themselves; that each one stands in the closest connection with the upheaval of the loftiest mountains, with the formation of great volcanic islands, and, in truth, with the building up of entire continents. And, in like manner, plants were discussed as if they were obedient to no law of grouping, as if they were scattered broadcast over the earth, having no relation to zones of vegetation, to isothermal and isochimenal lines; as if, in fact, there was no suspicion of any principle underlying the very existence of the whole vegetable kingdom. And so, too, with such phenomena as the Aurora Borealis; they were treated as isolated features, ratherthan in their relations to the globe; the connection was not seen between the maritime discoveries of voyagers and the great system of oceanic currents, on which voyagers are so dependent; in fact, the whole influence of the world of matter on the world of mind was unexplored.
And in order to study what was called Political Geography, a vast mass of materials was converted into a stiff, ritualistic frame-work, in the effort to impose some system and imaginal completeness on it, and not in order to grasp facts and truths in their mutual relations and inward life; they were merely arranged for convenient reference and for available use in the departments of military science, politics, statistics, and history; a method which is plainly our inheritance from the Middle Ages, and which bears the marks of those days. Thus from this arbitrary arrangement, made without reference to any indwelling necessity, sprang the three groups with which we are familiar: Chronography and Topography forming the first, Ethnography and Anthropology the second, and Statistics and History the third, or Political Geography.
From these three groups our ordinary text-books compile their usual aggregate of facts, and each becomes after its own pattern a motley in miniature. They contain variable quantities of this triple mass of materials, and follow no law but the demands of the time when they see the light; they favor, like our light literature, the whim of the hour, and are political, military, or commercial, as the public may demand. A systematic exposition of geography is very seldom to be found in them. A harmony of parts, a true harmony, is very rarely attained in their pages. They are at the foundation only arbitrary and unmethodical collections of all facts which are ascertained to exist throughout the earth. They are arranged according to countries, or great natural divisions; but the relation of one great natural division to another, the mutual and immense influence of one country on another, is never mentioned. The description of Europe follows in them to-day the same order in which Strabo set the pattern. The facts are arranged as the pieces of a counterpane, as if every one existed in itself and for itself, and had no connections with others. The setting out of these facts follows the rubrical method of grouping, according to boundary, soil, mountains, rivers, products, and cities. The beginning is usually made withboundarieswhich are generally most unstable and uncertain,instead of being made with some rudimental fact around which all others arrange themselves as a center.
If we compare these geographical treatises with those made in the interest of any other great department, we shall speedily discover that they indicate knowledge rather than science; they form a mere aggregation and index of rich materials, a lexicon rather than a true text-book. And therefore ensues, despite the undenied interest of the subject and its high claims, the mechanical and unfruitful method only too common—the crowding of the memory without judgment, without thought; thence comes it that Geography has taken so low a place among our school studies, worthy only of the youngest of the pupils, and presenting little stimulus even to them.
It will be my effort, in the course of these lectures, to exhibit the subject of relations rather than to detain you with descriptions; in one word, to generalize rather than to add new details. In the lack of a thoroughly excellent text-book of geography, I shall presuppose an acquaintance on your part with the materials, so to speak, of which the science is to be constructed.
It has been a customary method to treat geography in connection with epochs of time; dealing with it as it was in the past and as it is in the present. We hear of Ancient Geography, the Geography of the Middle Ages, and Modern Geography. In this course of lectures, it will be treated not as the property of one age or another, but rather as a growth of all time, from Herodotus down to our day. It is only in this way that we can ascertain what is permanent and what is ephemeral; only in this way can we subject geography to that comparative method which has given such an impetus to the advancement of the sister sciences of Natural History; only in this way can we see how the present is the birthright of the past. Archæology, ethnography, and civil science are all gainers by this method of treatment; in one word, the whole domain of cotemporaneous study. The less positive knowledge we possess of the formative processes of science, the more crude our hypotheses, the more flagrant our errors. This is constantly verified under our eyes; the errors of the past are the wisdom of the present, and the gradual upheavals of our knowledge become indices, not less of outgrown untruths than of truths yet to be revealed.
The sources of geography, as of history, are twofold—established memorials and continued investigations. The study of it has this great advantage at the outset, that the surface of the earth is a standing monument of the past. We are obliged to search where all lies open; where investigation must be crowned with success. No manuscripts in this great library have perished; they all exist as legible, as accessible as ever. Moreover, personal investigation must be made by every student in order to understand the results of the investigations of others. Wherever our home is, there lie all the materials which we need for the study of the entire globe. Humboldt hints at this when he says in his Kosmos: “Every little nook and shaded corner is but a reflection of the whole of Nature.” The roaring mountain brook is the type of the thundering cataract; the geological formations of a single little island, suggest the broken coast lines of a continent; the study of the boulders which are so thickly scattered in token of a great primeval deluge from the north, reveals the structure of whole mountain chains. The digging of every well may contribute to our knowledge of the earth’s crust; the excavations made in the building of railroads may, without the loss of time, labor, and expense, be a ceaseless source of instruction. In the structure of a spear of grass, of a rush, of a single monocotyledon, may be studied in miniature the palm-tree, prince of the tropics; in the mosses and lichens on our walls, the stunted growths of mountain tops may be investigated. A small range of hills may be taken as the type of the loftiest Cordillera. The eye may be easily trained to see all the greater in the less. The study of our own district is the true key to the understanding of the forms and the phenomena of foreign lands. Whoever has wandered through the valleys and woods, and over the hills and mountains of his own State, will be the one capable of following a Herodotus in his wanderings over the globe. He, and he alone, will be able, with true appreciation, to accompany travelers through all foreign lands. The very first step in a knowledge of geography is to know thoroughly the district where we live.
Unfortunately the text-books which we now possess do not discuss, with any approach to exhaustiveness, the districts where theirreaders live; and hence they cannot give any true inductive generalization of the large and the remote. In ancient times, the study of geography began with the world of nature, not with the world of books. Herodotus, being 444 years B. C., became, by virtue of his investigations on his wanderings, the first critical geographer of the Greeks. Polybius traveled through the Alps and Pyrenees, Gaul and Spain, to be able to write the history of Hannibal’s campaigns. He explored the Black Sea and Egypt, in quest of facts. He is the father of all military geography; the greatest strategists have busied themselves with writing commentaries on Polybius. Strabo, the most industrious geographer of his age, did not write till he had traveled from the Caucasus to the Rhone, and from the Alps to Ethiopia.
Philip Cluver, of Dantzig, who died in 1623, the true founder of classical geography, collected, by personal investigations, the materials of his great work on Germany, Italy, and ancient Sicily, all of which countries he traversed thoroughly, the classic authors in his hand.
Alexander von Humboldt has become, by his thorough studies of nature in Europe, Asia, and America, the founder of Comparative Geography. He was thoroughly acquainted with every geographical form in the neighborhood of his home, before he traveled into foreign lands. These examples show that personal investigation is one of the most reliable of all sources of geographical knowledge.
The second class of these sources is the accounts given in the published memoirs of travelers. In more primitive days than these, when very little was known regarding the earth, personal examination was easily completed, with a good degree of fullness, by almost any tourist. With the advance of knowledge, the narratives of travelers have increased, and the sum total of facts observed has become unwieldy; and, where facts have been wanting, the imagination has amply supplied their place. Of course, a single life soon became too short for the personal examination of every quarter of the globe; the narratives of those who had thoroughly explored any one were accepted as authoritative, and these accounts soon became the most generally available of all the sources of geographical knowledge. Yet, with this limitation, that now theirabundance and their exactness tend to repress and almost to destroy any personal inquiry whatever. Nothing can take the place of some exploration and investigation on the part of the student of geography.
To the accounts of scientific travelers, may be added those maps and globes which indicate the contour and the vertical elevations and depressions of the earth or its divisions. The demand for perfect accuracy in these is now very great. The map must be a portrait, not a caricature. In its way, the map has a certain dictatorial authority; it is so decisive in its very character, that errors in it are far more dangerous than in the letter-press of books. The English excel in the beauty of their maps: there are none in the world engraved with the rare excellence of theirs; but their care to secure accuracy is not commensurate. The French and the Germans vie for the honor of perfectly transcribing nature.
The sciences which are called in to illustrate the thorough study of geography have largely increased in number within the past few years. They are, for the most part, the same which illustrate history; to which may be added mathematics and natural history. It is a very great mistake to suppose that all that bears upon geography can be crowded within the covers of a single book. It is commonly supposed that geography is a matter of memory. Even in its elementary forms, it is capable of a constructive treatment. Many a teacher, who has not paid special attention to this department, dreams that he can qualify himself by running through a single text-book. No philologist would dream that, with a grammar and dictionary, he could grasp any constructive theory of language. There must first be the study, comparatively, of the great classes. And in geography, the personal study of the earth, with critical closeness, and in the comparative method, is the true way.
Another very common error is, that geography must subsidize what is most striking in other sciences, and thereby gain its charms and attain its uses. Thus geography becomes everything—history, statistics, statecraft, physics, a catalogue of all the possessions of natural history, in all its kingdoms. It takes on all colors, and meanwhile loses its own. It merges all its individuality in otherprovinces. In no way can it escape this disintegrating force, unless by holding fast to some central principle of being; and that is the relation of all the phenomena and forms of nature to the human race. It cannot exist, if it is to be merely an aggregate of all science, a mosaic of all colors. It is to use the whole circle of sciences to illustrate its own individuality, not to exhibit their peculiarities. It must make them all give a portion, not the whole, and yet must keep itself single and clear.
For the comprehension of mathematical geography, a knowledge of the elements of mathematics and astronomy is indispensable. For determining localities, and for using many needed instruments, there must be some skill in practical astronomy; for measuring distances, for projecting maps and charts, and locating geographical districts upon them, there must be some familiarity with trigonometry and the higher mathematics. No one can thoroughly study geography in foreign lands, and leave all astronomical instruments behind.
Political geography demands an acquaintance with history, and the same helps which the study of history requires. The civil status of no country can be determined without this. Büsching’s “Europe” was a master-piece of its time. But it was impossible for even that book to compress within its covers the whole history of that continent in its relation to the geography of Europe.
The study of Man is, of course, in most intimate alliance with geography. It is only since the opening of this century that ethnography has become a prominent and clearly defined province of science, and enabled to become a great tributary of geography; in fact, the greatest tributary. Other departments are also drawn upon; there can be no close study of the soil, the structure of mountains and plains, without mineralogy and geology. Meteorology, too, the science which discusses the climatic conditions of countries and the effects of climate upon the organization of plants, animals, and man, is of no mean value in illustrating geography. Nor can one be a great geographer who does not understand the flora of the world. Not that he needs to be familiar with the myriads of plants, but the laws of growth and the characteristics of localization must be known. The geographer does not need to repeat in detail where the cereals and the palm-tree thrive. The general conditions whichcontrol the growth of plants are all that he has to concern himself with. The main auxiliary for this is furnished in the botanical garden, where the eye sees the products of all localities, arranged, according to their grouping, in the countries where they are indigenous. Botany and zoology and mineralogy are among the sciences most valuable in throwing light upon geography; they display best what wealth each country holds in store for the uses of man; for they are closely connected with the development of industry, the arts, and trade.
This brings us to the last province, commerce, the science of interchange. The study of minerals, of the distribution of plants and animals, is of little advantage, aside from commerce and its uses to man. It is the interchange of the products of one region for those of another which has had, on the whole, the greatest influence on the human race. Think, for an instant, of the transfer of the potato from America to Europe, of maize to Asia; of the far more ancient introduction of wheat and rice from Asia into Europe; and not these alone, but almost all the fruits. Think of the carrying from Asia to America, and, in fact, to all tropical lands, such products as sugar, coffee, and cotton. Think, too, of the results of the search for gold, ivory, and slaves in the interior of Africa, and of gold in California and Australia, opening such immense districts to settlements. The search after platina has disclosed the most guarded recesses of the Cordilleras and the Ural chain; while the need of copper first gave us our complete knowledge of the great system of American lakes. Without the expeditions to secure the whale, the walrus, and the seal, as well as the fur-bearing animals, the polar world would be still untraversed. The discovery of coal on a hundred shores otherwise unknown, led to the settlement of man in colonies from India and China southward to the Antarctic Continent, and northward to Nova Zembla, Spitzbergen, and Greenland.
And not the continents only, seas and oceans have been thoroughly studied, in order to secure a safe pathway for man to the regions which contain his spoils. In the furtherance of this, the highest praise must be awarded to the British government. Through its enterprise and liberality, almost every island group has been examined, a thorough study of marine currents undertaken, careful soundings made in all waters, and a most extensive chartographyaccomplished. The charts published by the English admiralty already are counted by thousands.
Yet the French have not been backward in like investigations. Understanding the value of commerce, their Dépôt de la Marine has not been inactive. Scandinavia has also done her part. The United States has accomplished one of the most thorough coast surveys ever undertaken by any nation; its difficulties are only to be measured by its extent. In fact, the whole civilised world has sent its messengers to the ends of the earth, and have united in this grand crusade of our age, the enriching of all men by a liberal system of interchange of the commodities of all climes.