Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/185

 Large areas of this interesting country have not yet been revealed to us, nor can we expect to acquire a full knowledge of its Geographic wonders until the means of internal communication have become more assured.

The recent inauguration of a Geographical Society in Peru is also an important step towards our acquirement of more detailed information, and doubtless will redound to the credit of its founders in the interest it will stimulate in kindred societies over the world.

Geology is a science so intimately connected with Geography that I should feel delinquent did I not include a reference to it in this report, however inadequate my remarks may be to do justice to the subject.

To Geographers the origin of the varied distribution of the land and water, the cause and growth of mountains, plains, oceans, lakes and rivers, the great changes that have taken place on the face of the earth in times past, is of absorbing interest, rivaled only by their desire for perfect knowledge of that which may be seen to-day. Had the prehistoric man been gifted with the intelligence of his descendants in the present epoch, he would have left for us a record that would have been valuable indeed and cleared our way of much that now is speculation, and but too often food for words. True it is, however, that if the mysteries of the past were revealed to us we should lose the pleasures their study affords and perhaps there would follow a degeneration of species through the loss of stimulus they now provide. How long ago man lived and might have made a record is still a disputed question, but one that involves too, the record of the earth herself. The association of human remains in the Glacial drift brings that epoch in the earth's history nearer to us by several hundred thousand years, and instead of speculating upon it as having occurred nearly a million years ago, geologists must consider whether it was not probably coincident with the most recent eccentricity of the earth which astronomers teach us happened about ten or fifteen thousand years ago. Geology must also fit her facts to mathematical science if we give credence to latest computations. A mathematician has now advanced the theory that at the average depth of about five miles below the surface there is a belt of "no strain," the result of opposing forces above and below it, a belt that from the nature of the case is impenetrable, through which, what is above cannot pass to what is below, and what is below cannot pass to what is above, a condition that