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 space on the map; but discovery has not ended when the blank spaces are filled, for, after all, the map is but a sheet of paper upon which we place symbols and lines that stand for realities and their surface arrangement, such as a river or a mountain or a city; and it is the character of the mountain, the peculiarities of the river, the conditions of life and the relations of the people who live in the cities, or in fields on the plains, or along river banks and in mountain valleys, and who transport, manufac- ture, and perhaps have political relations and boundaries, ports, colonies, and the like, that are of abiding interest. The stage upon which humanity plays the great game of life is an important thing, but the play is much more important. Dis- covery can hardly be said to be ended until we have studied every people in the world in its peculiar physical setting, made nations known to one another, and perchance lessened our troubles by revealing us to ourselves. Long before the sources of the Nile were discovered by European explorers there were people living about the headwaters of the Nile. Indians had roamed the forests of the Rio Roosevelt for centuries before the discovery in 1913 of that thousand-mile river in the heart of the Amazon country. The Quechua and Aymara Indians of the Central Andes have passed almost daily in and out of the ruins of buildings that their ancestors constructed centuries ago but of whose existence we were unaware until the present genera- tion. Until facts like these have been discovered and their ex- act character made known through published records, they are the exclusive possession of merely primitive peoples. They have not yet been discovered by science.

It is in this sense that the geographer undertakes the study of new lands and regions today. For him the world is far from being explored. Until a few decades ago we had almost no accurate scientific information about the distinctive conditions of life in South America, or about the distribution and charac- ter of people who found it difficult either to achieve or to keep a national unity. Until two decades ago the physiography of the great Andean chain was almost completely unknown. We were aware of the length and breadth of the mountains, the sources of the most important rivers, the heights of passes and