particulars arising from comparing one part with another”; but
under this head the questions discussed were longitude, the situation
and distances of places, and navigation. Varenius does not treat
of special geography, but gives a scheme for it under three heads—(1)
Terrestrial, including position, outline, boundaries, mountains,
mines, woods and deserts, waters, fertility and fruits, and living
creatures; (2) Celestial, including appearance of the heavens and
the climate; (3) Human, but this was added out of deference to
popular usage.
This system of geography founded a new epoch, and the book—translated into English, Dutch and French—was the unchallenged standard for more than a century. The framework was capable of accommodating itself to new facts, and was indeed far in advance of the knowledge of the period. The method included a recognition of the causes and effects of phenomena as well as the mere fact of their occurrence, and for the first time the importance of the vertical relief of the land was fairly recognized.
The physical side of geography continued to be elaborated after Varenius’s methods, while the historical side was developed separately. Both branches, although enriched by new facts, remained stationary so far as method is concerned until nearly the end of the 18th century. The compilation of “geography books” by uninstructed writers led to the pernicious habit, which is not yet wholly overcome, of reducing the general or “physical” part to a few pages of concentrated information, and expanding the particular or “political” part by including unrevised travellers’ stories and uncritical descriptions of the various countries of the world. Such books were in fact not geography, but merely compressed travel.
The next marked advance in the theory of geography may be taken as the nearly simultaneous studies of the physical earth carried out by the Swedish chemist, Torbern Bergman, acting under the impulse of Linnaeus, and by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Bergman’s Physical Description of Bergman. the Earth was published in Swedish in 1766, and translated into English in 1772 and into German in 1774. It is a plain, straightforward description of the globe, and of the various phenomena of the surface, dealing only with definitely ascertained facts in the natural order of their relationships, but avoiding any systematic classification or even definitions of terms.
The problems of geography had been lightened by the destructive criticism of the French cartographer D’Anville (who had purged the map of the world of the last remnants of traditional fact unverified by modern observations) and rendered richer by the dawn of the new era of scientific Kant.travel, when Kant brought his logical powers to bear upon them. Kant’s lectures on physical geography were delivered in the university of Königsberg from 1765 onwards.[1] Geography appealed to him as a valuable educational discipline, the joint foundation with anthropology of that “knowledge of the world” which was the result of reason and experience. In this connexion he divided the communication of experience from one person to another into two categories—the narrative or historical and the descriptive or geographical; both history and geography being viewed as descriptions, the former a description in order of time, the latter a description in order of space.
Physical geography he viewed as a summary of nature, the basis not only of history but also of “all the other possible geographies,” of which he enumerates five, viz. (1) Mathematical geography, which deals with the form, size and movements of the earth and its place in the solar system; (2) Moral geography, or an account of the different customs and characters of mankind according to the region they inhabit; (3) Political geography, the divisions according to their organized governments; (4) Mercantile geography, dealing with the trade in the surplus products of countries; (5) Theological geography, or the distribution of religions. Here there is a clear and formal statement of the interaction and causal relation of all the phenomena of distribution on the earth’s surface, including the influence of physical geography upon the various activities of mankind from the lowest to the highest. Notwithstanding the form of this classification, Kant himself treats mathematical geography as preliminary to, and therefore not dependent on, physical geography. Physical geography itself is divided into two parts: a general, which has to do with the earth and all that belongs to it—water, air and land; and a particular, which deals with special products of the earth—mankind, animals, plants and minerals. Particular importance is given to the vertical relief of the land, on which the various branches of human geography are shown to depend.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was the first modern geographer to become a great traveller, and thus to acquire an extensive stock of first-hand information on which an improved system of geography might be founded. The impulse given to the study of natural history by the example of Linnaeus; Humboldt. the results brought back by Sir Joseph Banks, Dr Solander and the two Forsters, who accompanied Cook in his voyages of discovery; the studies of De Saussure in the Alps, and the lists of desiderata in physical geography drawn up by that investigator, combined to prepare the way for Humboldt. The theory of geography was advanced by Humboldt mainly by his insistence on the great principle of the unity of nature. He brought all the “observable things,” which the eager collectors of the previous century had been heaping together regardless of order or system, into relation with the vertical relief and the horizontal forms of the earth’s surface. Thus he demonstrated that the forms of the land exercise a directive and determining influence on climate, plant life, animal life and on man himself. This was no new idea; it had been familiar for centuries in a less definite form, deduced from a priori considerations, and so far as regards the influence of surrounding circumstances upon man, Kant had already given it full expression. Humboldt’s concrete illustrations and the remarkable power of his personality enabled him to enforce these principles in a way that produced an immediate and lasting effect. The treatises on physical geography by Mrs Mary Somerville and Sir John Herschel (the latter written for the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) showed the effect produced in Great Britain by the stimulus of Humboldt’s work.
Humboldt’s contemporary, Carl Ritter (1779–1859), extended and disseminated the same views, and in his interpretation of “Comparative Geography” he laid stress on the importance of forming conclusions, not from the study of one region by itself, but from the comparison of the phenomena of many places. Ritter. Impressed by the influence of terrestrial relief and climate on human movements, Ritter was led deeper and deeper into the study of history and archaeology. His monumental Vergleichende Geographie, which was to have made the whole world its theme, died out in a wilderness of detail in twenty-one volumes before it had covered more of the earth’s surface than Asia and a portion of Africa. Some of his followers showed a tendency to look on geography rather as an auxiliary to history than as a study of intrinsic worth.
During the rapid development of physical geography many
branches of the study of nature, which had been included in the
cosmography of the early writers, the physiography of
Linnaeus and even the Erdkunde of Ritter, had been
so much advanced by the labours of specialists Geography
as a natural science.that
their connexion was apt to be forgotten. Thus geology,
meteorology, oceanography and anthropology developed
into distinct sciences. The absurd attempt was, and sometimes
is still, made by geographers to include all natural science in geography; but it is more common for specialists in the various detailed
sciences to think, and sometimes to assert, that the ground of
physical geography is now fully occupied by these sciences. Political
geography has been too often looked on from both sides as a mere
summary of guide-book knowledge, useful in the schoolroom, a poor
relation of physical geography that it was rarely necessary to
recognize.
The science of geography, passed on from antiquity by Ptolemy, re-established by Varenius and Newton, and systematized by Kant, included within itself definite aspects of all those terrestrial phenomena which are now treated exhaustively under the heads of geology, meteorology, oceanography and anthropology; and the inclusion of the requisite portions of the perfected results of these sciences in geography is simply the gathering in of fruit matured from the seed scattered by geography itself.
The study of geography was advanced by improvements in cartography (see Map), not only in the methods of survey and projection, but in the representation of the third dimension by means of contour lines introduced by Philippe Buache in 1737, and the more remarkable because less obvious invention of isotherms introduced by Humboldt in 1817.
The “argument from design” had been a favourite form of reasoning amongst Christian theologians, and, as worked out by Paley in his Natural Theology, it served the useful purpose of emphasizing the fitness which exists between all the inhabitants of the earth and their physical The teleological argument in geography.environment. It was held that the earth had been created so as to fit the wants of man in every particular. This argument was tacitly accepted or explicitly avowed by almost every writer on the theory of geography, and Carl Ritter distinctly recognized and adopted it as the unifying principle of his system. As a student of nature, however, he did not fail to see, and as professor of geography he always taught, that man was in very large measure conditioned by his physical environment. The apparent opposition of the observed fact to the assigned theory he overcame by looking upon the forms of the land and the arrangement of land and sea as instruments of Divine Providence for guiding the destiny as well as for supplying the requirements of man. This was the central theme of Ritter’s philosophy; his religion and his geography were one, and the consequent fervour with which he pursued his mission goes far to account for the immense influence he acquired in Germany.
The evolutionary theory, more than hinted at in Kant’s “Physical Geography,” has, since the writings of Charles Darwin, become the unifying principle in geography. The conception of the development of the plan of the earth from the first cooling of the surface of the planet throughout the long The theory of evolution in geography. geological periods, the guiding power of environment on the circulation of water and of air, on the distribution of plants and animals, and finally on the movements of man, give to geography a philosophical dignity and a scientific completeness
- ↑ Printed in Schriften zur physischen Geographie, vol. vi. of Schubert’s edition of the collected works of Kant (Leipzig, 1839). First published with notes by Rink in 1802.
