Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/37

 previous lower stand of the land to its present elevation. There is a parable that illustrates the principle here presented.

An antiquary enters a studio and finds a sculptor at work on a marble statue. The design is as yet hardly perceptible in the rough cut block, from which the chisel strikes off large chips at every blow; but on looking closer the antiquary discovers that the block itself is an old torso, broken and weather beaten, and at once his imagination runs back through its earlier history. This is not the first time that the marble has lain on a sculptor's table, and suffered the strong blows of the first rough shaping. Long ago it was chipped and cut and polished into shape, and perhaps even set up in its completed form in some garden, but then it was neglected and badly used, thrown over and broken, till its perfect shape was lost, and it was sold for nothing more than a marble block, to be carved over again if the sculptor sees fit. Now it just beginning its second career. We may find many parallels to this story in the land about us, when we study its history through its form. The sequence of events and consequently of forms is so apparent here that no one could have difficulty in interpreting history from form, and it shall come to be the same in geography. The gorge of the Wissahickon through the highland northwest of Philadelphia can have no other interpretation than one that likens it to the first quick work of the sculptor on the old torso.

An essential as well as an advantage in this extension of the study of geography will be the definition of types and terms, both chosen in accordance with a rational and if possible a natural system of classification. Types and terms are both already introduced into geographic study, for its very elements present them to the beginner in a simple and rather vague way: mountains are high and rough; lakes are bodies of standing water, and so on. It is to such types and terms as these that every scholar must continually return as he reads accounts of the world, and it is to be regretted that the types are yet so poorly chosen and so imperfectly illustrated, and that the terms are so few and so insufficient. Physical geography is particularly deficient in these respects, and needs to be greatly modified in the light of the modern advance of topography General accounts of continental homologies of course have their interest and their value, but they are of the kind that would associate whales with fishes and bats with birds. The kind of reform that is needed here may be per-