Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/484

466 capable of as great precision as any of the other natural sciences. It has humanized geography, so to speak, even as M. Guyot did in his time and generation; and it has enriched history and sociology in a new and unexpected way.

Historians have of late shown a distinct tendency toward a fuller appreciation of the importance of physical environment in human affairs. The movement is probably at one with the newer conceptions of the pre-potency of social over political factors in the making of history. At all events, geography and history have been drawing nearer to one another under the distinguished leadership of the authors of The American Common-wealth, and of The Norman Conquest of England in the Old World. In America our own Justin Winsor has contributed manfully to the same end. We have now to bring still other elements—anthropology and sociology—into touch with these other two, to form a combination possessed of singular suggestiveness. It affords at once a means for the quantitative measurement of racial migrations and social movements; and it yields a living picture of the population—the raw material—in and through which all history must of necessity work. Studing men as merely physical types of the higher animals, we are able to trace their movements as we do those of the lower species; we may correlate these results with the physical geography and the economic character of the environment; and then, at last, superpose the social phenomena in their geographical distribution. We attempt to discover relations either of cause and effect, or at least of parallelism and similarity due to a common cause which lies back of them all—perhaps in human nature itself. Anthropology, geography, sociology, correlated and combined, such is the effect.

Our study thus overlaps several fields of investigation which have stood quite remote from one another in the past; yet it draws its material from each, and then returns it again endowed with a new and living significance. Some one has rightly said that many great advances in human knowledge have been due to those who effected new combinations of ideas by bringing together results from widely separated sciences. Helmholtz stands as a great modern example, physiologist, mathematician, natural philosopher. Goethe, Spencer, and many more could be cited as well in defense of the same proposition. Science advances by the revelation of new relationships between things. In the present case the hope of perhaps striking a spark, by knocking these divers sciences together, has induced men to collect materials, often in ignorance of the exact use to which they might be