Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/565

 geology, zoölogy, and botany; but the debt is not all on one side. Save for the impetus derived from geographical research, many of these sciences would not be in their present advanced condition. They gain in vast augmentation of facts, and may cheerfully lend their aid in correlating these for geographical requirements.

In no respect does modern geography stand out more prominently than in the greater precision and fullness of its work. It has fitted out exploratory expeditions, and in so doing has been careful to see them provided with the instruments and apparatus necessary to enable them to contribute accurate and definite results. It has guided and fostered research, and has been eager to show a generous appreciation of the labors of those by whom our knowledge of the earth has been extended. Human courage and endurance are not less enthusiastically applauded than they once were; but they must be united to no common powers of observation before they will now raise a traveler to the highest rank. When we read a volume of recent travel, while warmly appreciating the spirit of adventure, fertility of resource, presence of mind, and other moral qualities of its author, we instinctively ask ourselves, as we close its pages, What may be the sum of its additions to our knowledge of the earth? From the geographical point of view—and it is to this point alone that these remarks apply—we must rank an explorer according to his success in widening our knowledge and enlarging our views regarding the aspects of nature.

The demands of modern geography are thus becoming every year more exacting. It requires more training in its explorers abroad, more knowledge on the part of its readers at home. The days are drawing to a close when one can gain undying geographical renown by struggling against man and beast, fever and hunger and drought, across some savage and previously unknown region, even though little can be shown as the outcome of the journey. All honor to the pioneers by whom this first exploratory work has been so nobly done! They will be succeeded by a race that will find its laurels more difficult to win—a race from which more will be expected and which will need to make up in the variety, amount, and value of its detail, what it lacks in the freshness of first glimpses into new lands.

With no other science has geography become more intimately connected than with geology, and the connection is assuredly destined to become yet deeper and closer. These two branches of human knowledge are, to use Hakluyt's phrase, "the sunne and moone, the right eye and the left," of all fruitful inquiry into the character and history of the earth's surface. As it is impossible to understand the genius and temperament of a people, its laws and institutions, its manners and customs, its buildings, and its industries, unless we trace back the history of that people, and mark the rise and effect of each varied influence by which its progress has been molded in past generations; so it is clear that our knowledge of the aspect of a continent, its mountains