Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/99

Rh Why does Japan wish to expand in territory? We need only study the physical character of Japan to know. Why is Nevada such a backward state, and why is Arizona such an unpromising candidate for statehood ? Here again geography can give an answer. Why did the negro race in central Africa remain for ages in an isolated, uncivilized, undeveloped condition ? To answer that fully one must take account of the Sahara desert on the north and the great forest belt which follows in a wide, deep margin the west African coast.

Yet geography, with most people, has always been a "dry" study. Jnst why this is so might be discussed, perhaps, so as to yield interesting conclusions. Possibly, as taught for so long in the past, it was too unreal, too make-believe, too artificial to arouse interest, especially the interest of those with little imagina- tion. The north was always up, the south down, the east at the right and the west at the left of the page. To be sure, the earth was round, with flat- tened poles, because the book said so ; yet what one in a thousand, since the globular condition of the earth was accepted as a fact by the civilized world, has easily comprehended the sig- nificance of the great and small circles as to distances over continents and oceans ? Then, too, the misconceptions one may draw from the ordinary maps are enormous, as Lord Salisbury inti- mated so strongly. We are so accus- tomed to large maps of our little corners of the earth that when we see maps of Asia, or Africa, made of the same size, our ideas as to the extent of those regious go hopelessly astray. When some one comes along and tells us how many Frances or Germanys or Englands could be embraced within the boundaries of Tibet, we are well-nigh upset. When President Roosevelt talks about "the mastery of the 'Pacific,'" not one American in 500 can conceive the proposition in terms of geography, and geography has a tremendous lot to do with international politics.

It is said that geography is still largely a monopoly of the German schools ; in England, they are poorly off, according to the complaints lately made in the London press. It is encouraging, however, to note a growing insistence everywhere upon fuller geographical knowledge and more nearly correct geographical ideas. No one can be a man or woman of real education and culture in the future to whom geography, in no narrow sense, is virtually a closed book.

HE accompanying plates of high and low tides in the Bay of Fundy are enlarged from photographs taken by Mr Roland Hay ward, of Milton, Mass. , in the summer of 1903. The views are of double value — first, in showing tides of unusual strength, and, again, in being taken from the same points for both high and low tides. The following general statements are from an article by Chalmers in the Report of the Geological Survey of Canada for 1894 (1895):

The mouth of the bay is 48 miles wide and from 70 to 1 10 fathoms deep. The bottom rises at a rate of 4 feet to a mile for 145 miles, to the head of the bay. On the coast near the mouth the spring tides vary from 12 to 18 feet. Within the bay the spring and neap tides are as follows: Digby Neck, 22, 18; St John, 27, 23 ; Petitcodiac River, 46, 36 ; Cumberland Basin, 44, 35 ; Noel River, in Cobequid Bay, 53, 31. The last named is, according to Chalmers, the greatest tidal range authentically