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746 contain similar groups of professed geographers with similar organizations, journals, and other publications. The New World also has its geographical societies, and with the formation of one in Japan they are penetrating the Orient. Here, then, is no national, or even international, but a world-wide phenomenon—a universal brotherhood. It is a real fraternity in which the individual members and the several groups are linked together by a highly organized system of intercommunications, by common aims and purposes, by a common method of thought and observation, by a common symbolism and system of formulæ, by common beliefs about the world and men's place therein. To imagine the resources of geographical science, we must think not only of its accumulated documents, instruments, and aptitudes, but also in a still higher degree of the spiritual forces that pervade and animate this universal organization, this world-extensive community of similar minds. And anyone who is learned enough to master the symbolism of geography, to consult the files of the periodical publications, is, if not a full brother, yet a novitiate of this universal fraternity. And to be a member of this community, what does it mean? It means much or little, in proportion to the impulse and knowledge to utilize the collective resources of the community.

XIX. It is the boast and—a real and justifiable boast—of the Catholic church that its pope is a servant of every member of the church down to the most insignificant—that he is, in name and fact, servus servorum. Now, in the scientific community there is no pope, but there are many high-priests. The scientific community is a democratic organization, not a hierarchic one. Its high-priests are just those members of the community who have themselves done most to forward the progress of their science. Every high-priest of geography, as of every science, is, in quite a literal sense, a slave of every investigator who is working in that particular field, or a related one. The organization of research, and the system of intercommunications, are so arranged that the tasks that are beyond the strength, and the problems beyond the power, of the ordinary members of the community, are continually being collected and automatically delivered at the