Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/205

Rh but comparatively a very small area with the essential features of which we are not now fairly well acquainted. Day by day our maps become more complete, and with our greatly-improved means of communication the knowledge of distant countries is constantly enlarged and more widely diffused. Somewhat in the same proportion the demands for more exact information become more pressing. The necessary consequence is an increased tendency to give to geographical investigations a more strictly scientific direction. In proof of this I may instance the fact that the two British naval expeditions now being carried on, that of the Challenger and that of the arctic seas, have been organized almost entirely for general scientific research, and comparatively little for topographical discovery. Narratives of travels, which not many years ago might have been accepted as valuable contributions to our then less perfect knowledge, would now perhaps be regarded as superficial and insufficient. In short, the standard of knowledge of travelers and writers on geography must be raised to meet the increased requirements of the time.

Other influences are at work tending to the same result. The great advance made in all branches of natural science limits more and more closely the facilities for original research, and drawls the observer of Nature into more and more special studies, while it renders the acquisition by any individual of the highest standard of knowledge in more than one or two special subjects comparatively difficult and rare. At the same time the mutual interdependence of all natural phenomena daily becomes more apparent; and it is of ever-increasing importance that there shall be some among the cultivators of natural knowledge who specially direct their attention to the general relations existing among all the forces and phenomena of Nature. In some important branches of such subjects, it is only through study of the local physical conditions of various parts of the earth's surface and the complicated phenomena to which they give rise that sound conclusions can be established; and this study constitutes physical or scientific geography. It is very necessary to bear in mind that a large portion of the phenomena dealt with by the sciences of observation relates to the earth as a whole in contradistinction to the substances of which it is formed, and can only be correctly appreciated in connection with the terrestrial or geographical conditions of the place where they occur. On the one hand, therefore, while the proper prosecution of the study of physical geography requires a sound knowledge of the researches and conclusions of students in the special branches of science, on the other, success is not attainable in the special branches without suitable apprehension of geographical facts. For these reasons it appears to me that the general progress of science will involve the study of geography in a more scientific spirit, and with a clearer conception of its true function, which is that of obtaining accurate notions of the manner in which the forces of Nature have brought