Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/752

 736 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

hood leaves on the mind is apt to be a picture of the country called France, which is little more than an octagonal red patch ; of Spain, a square brown patch ; of Scandinavia, an oblong green patch ; of the Rhine, a blue line running from a dark patch called Switzer- land, to a blue patch called the German Ocean. The experience of reading, observation, and travel doubtless supplements and cor- rects these crude pictorial impressions. And in proportion to the fulness of such later experience, we approximate more nearly to the vision of the geographer, who sees our globe as it really is, has been, and is becoming, in space and time. The geographer sees the land in its varying relief from seashore, over plain and plateau, valley and height, up to mountain summit. He sees below the surface of the waters, noting the space and level of river-bed, of lake and sea bottom. He sees the crust of the earth everywhere in section, from the lowest and oldest rocks up through the super- imposed geological strata, to the superficial deposits which wind and rain, storm and sunshine, snow and frost disintegrate for the making of soil, on which the flora of the world fixes itself and feeds, region by region, and across which the fauna of the world moves and makes its tiny marks and scratches. He sees the sur- face of the globe, changing from day to day, season to season, age to age, epoch to epoch. And these changes he sees to be brought about in part by the place of the globe in space, and its relation to other celestial bodies, and in part by the very shape, form, and character of the surface and configurations themselves. Thus to the geographer the phantasmagoria of visible things pre- sents itself as a drama a great cosmic drama in which the part allotted to the human species is both insignificant and predeter- mined in all essential respects. The operations of man on the planets are, from this point of view, limited and conditioned by in- exorable cosmic forces. The roads and railways, by which man connects his cities, are seen to be the merest scratches on the sur- face of the globe, wholly comparable in their significance to the tracks which the elephants make through the forest or the buffalo across the prairie. The cities themselves are but temporary en- campments of herding groups of animals, determined or condi-