Comparative geography

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niTEODUOTIOIf.

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Introductory Eemarks «

Introduction

The subject of these lectures is Geography in its most enlarged and comprehensive sense. It will be necessary to preface them with some general observations, which shall serve to indicate the scientific basis on which the discussion will rest. Our starting-point will be with Nature herself and not with arbitrary geographical systems hitherto constructed.

By the word Nature will be meant the entire Creation. The grasping of Nature in all its objects and all its forces becomes, in conjunction with the agency of Time and Space, the comprehension of a great system. The inanimate creation may be represented under the term inorganic, the animate creation under the term organic. Yet there is not an absolute contrast between them; for in both there is ceaseless progress, no pause, but in a higher and comprehensive sense a cosmical life, the whole forming one great Organism, in which the inorganic world, so called, is only the founHation on which the animate creation stands.

To us, our own Earth is the most marked feature of Nature viewed on its inorganic side. To us it is the planet best known of all, or rather the only one closely known, the point whence we draw conclusions on the whole Universe, the resting ground for the glass that searches the Kosmos, to use Humboldt's word, discerning the place which the Earth holds in it, and prying into the mysteries of the entire creation. Our globe is one of the major planets of our system, all of which gird the sun with great elliptic orbits, midway in which is our own. There begins the first popular division of the planets, — those that are within and those which are without our own orbit. This is one of the most simple of discriminations, one which we inherit from the ancients in an unmodified form. Humboldt retains this primary classification.

X INTRODUCTION.

The external planets are those whose orbits embrace that of the Earth within their own. The minor planets are those whose orbits are embraced by that of the Earth. These are Mercury and Venus.

The ancients, counting both tlie sun and moon, reckoned only seven planets. At the end of the eighteenth century another was added, Uranus, an external planet. Through the instrumentality of improved telescopes, soon after, four minor ones were discovered, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta; and by the still more perfect lenses recently introduced, and the assiduity and skill of astronomers, the number of these little planetary bodies, ranging between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, has grown great. Beyond Saturn and Uranus is Neptune, discovered mathematically by Le Verrier, in Paris, and seen by Galle in Berlin, the 23d of September, 1846.

To these (now eighty) planets may be added the twenty to thirty moons of our solar system, and a number of comets.

The middle position of the Earth's orbit is not without its consequences. The distance of the Earth from the Sun is, in round numbers, 92,000,000 of miles, nearly three times as far as that of Mercury, the planet nearest the Sun. Jupiter, on the other hand, is five times as far from the Sun as the Earth ; Uranus about nineteen times as far, and Neptune about thirty-three times as far.

The time of the Earth's revolution around the Sun is also equally removed from the extremes; its year is 365 days; Mercury's being 87 days; Jupiter's 11 of our years ; Uranus 84 years; and Neptune's 165 years.

The daily revolution of the Earth on its axis is also of only medium swiftness, consuming 24 hours. This, of course, controls the periods of waking and sleep of the entire animate creation on our globe. Some planets revolve slower, some more rapidly than our own; Jupiter's revolution, for example, is accomplished in little less than 10 hours. This extreme rapidity seems to account for the much greater flattening at the poles of the planets than the Earth exhibits, occasioned doubtless during the formation processes, while those immense revolving masses were passing from their primitive fluid state into the more rigid forms in which we know them. Of all the planets, however, the Earth has most perfectly retained the spherical shape: and the spherical form is in one sense a. medium form; i.e. it is removed from all extremes of angularity, and so falls in with the analogies which I am endeavoring to establish, springing from

INTRODUCTION. XI

the position of the Earth's orbit midway between those of the inner and outer planets. According to Plato, the beauty of form lies in symmetry, and our Earth is the most symmetrical of planets, and, unquestionably, the spherical shape is the one best adapted to the display of the largest number of phenomena possible.

The variations from the spherical form, produced by elevations and depressions, are only of medium magnitude in our globe compared with many others in our system. On the smaller planet of Venus, for example, the mountains are thought to rise to a height of many miles, while five is the greatest altitude of ours. According to Madler's conjectures, the mountains in our own moon rise to a height of over three miles, an altitude altogether out of proportion to the size of the moon as compared with the earth.

In respect to the number of its moons, too, our Earth is no extremist; it has but one: other planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, have none. On the other hnnd, Jupiter has 4, Saturn 7, Uranus 6 at least, and doubtless more. The general law seems to be, the farther from the Sun the greater the number of moons; perhaps in the wonderful providence of God, to compensate the feeble light of those distant realms by the number of the reflecting bodies.

Now, summing up all that has been said, it will be seen that the Earth is equally far removed from every extreme. This fundamental classification, drawn from the place of its orbit in relation to those nearer the Sun or more distant from it, gives it a character which is felt and seen in many different things, and responds to analogies which it is not incorrect to mark. A medium is seen in all its attributes and relations: it is neither the largest nor the smallest of planets; neither the swiftest nor the slowest; neither the warmest nor the coldest; in nothing is it either at a minimum nor at a maximum point. And this very medium character brings the Earth into harmony with the system of which it forms a part; the symmetry of the one corresponding with the symmetry of the other, and specially fits it to become the temporary home of a race like ours, which makes the whole surface of the globe tributary during the short terrestrial life of man to his preparation for a celestial state of being. Our globe is certainly the only one of our system which could possibly be inhabited by man; and as his residence, and as the arena for his culture, it is worthy of being studied in all its features ; no point is too trifling to be overlooked.

Xll INTRODUCTION.

As man looks for a center to the system which evidently pertains to him, and in which our Earth plays no slight part, the Sun is clearly the source of a large share of what makes our life desirable. Thence we receive light, warmth, and indirectly, and yet directly too, life and the bloom of health. Nor can men, even if ignorant and degraded, help seeing the relation of the Sun to the Earth, and linking, in their rude thoughts, the heavens with the earth; and hence, before all higher Revelation, the worship of the Sun has been the primitive instinct of the oldest of nations.

Looking at the earth as simply one among the innumerable hosts of heaven, it, like each one of them, becomes to the imagination a mere point of light, a "star among stars." But, when we shift our point of view, and leaving the cosmical or universal for the special, for what pertains to the individual life, the mere point of light flames up into a great, busy world, full of phenomena demanding investigation and thought. And yet this world, so attractive in its multiplicity of details, is almost a chaos at the first sight; a confused and inextricable mass, so large, so high, so deep as to defy human effort to compass or master it. Science alone, the gift and the growth of centuries, can measure the field; scieBce alone can enter it and reduce the chaos to a beautiful and orderly grouping, and make a perfect picture of the whole; it alone can dispel crude ideas and give truer ones in their stead. To the rude dweller on the plain, the earth seems a gigantic floor, as it did to many a tribe in the past, and as it does to-day to thousands of wondering Arabs. The South Sea Islander, in the Pacific, takes his island or island group to be the whole earth; the world he considers an endless ocean plain, from which the Sun arises, and, when the day is over, into which it sinks. And even within the pale of civilization itself, the ignorant Neapolitan lazzarone considers his gulf the center of the world.

As men advance in their inquiries, and, ascending the sides of mountains, look out over a larger tract, or find new lands across the seas, they do not outgrow their first idea, the world merely expands from the narrow homestead to a larger circle, such as the Romans used to call their orbis terrarum. The conception of the earth as a vast, unsupported ball, careering through the heavens, was the possession, slowly won, of such great minds as Pythagoras and Aristotle, and slowly found its way among the ideas whicli

INTRODUCTION. XUl

whole nations accepted as true. Circumnavigators must sail around the globe and tell their story to the world before the conjectures of science could have real weight with the popular mind in a matter so remote from the crude speculations of the ignorant as this. And less than one oentui-y and a half ago (in 1727) another step was taken, and the theory was propounded by Newton, that the Earth is a spheroid and not a perfect sphere. Later investigations have determined that the spheroidal form is only an approximation to perfect accuracy, and that the Earth is a polyhedron, whose exact number of zodes has not yet been determined, and which may prove indeterminable. Bessel has assigned, as the great task of science for the coming century, to settle this question with perfect exactness. But what has been said is enough to indicate that in our knowledge, at present, certainly there is only progress, only approximation, no absolute exhaustion of the processes of discovery.

And just as in ruder lands each man looks at his own island, or village, as the center of the earth's circle, so the ancients looked at the earth as the pivot of the universe, the central point around which all the heavenly hosts revolve. That was the fundamental principle of that Ptolemaic system which was older than Ptolemy; held in the most ancient times in Arabia, Babylon, Persia, and India, but first luminously expanded in the proportions and with the dignity of a system by Ptolemy. Its outlines were, in one word, this: there are seven planets, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; each has its own orbit, in which it is in a limited sense supreme, but they all revolve around the common center, the Earth. Beyond the seven, and including them all, is the Firmament, in which the other stars stand like golden nails in an imperishable floor; the whole vast external Firmament is opaque and motionless.

The Ptolemaic system won and held the greatest regard in the ancient world. Mohammed established it in the Koran as a truth of religion. The advance of science revealed the falseness of the Ptolemaic scheme of the universe, and demonstrated the fact that the stars of heaven are not mere torch-bearers for us, and mere interpreters of human destinies, but are worlds like our own, our earth being but one of numberless thousands equally worthy of the Common Creator. The Copernican system, which was to re-create the whole domain of science, wrought this great change. The B

XIV INTRODUCTION.

Sun, according to tliis theory, forms the central point arourd which, and not around the Earth, all the planets wheel. Copernicus, in 1543, left this imperfect and yet fruitful conception to his successors to unfold; and in the results gained by Kepler, in 1631, by Newton and Galileo, 1727, the Copernican system was firmly established. The vast improvements in the telescope removed the limits of the visible universe to a place till then unrevealed, and added inexhaustible fields to those which had been known before. The number of the planets was enlarged. The list of determined comets increases yearly. The number of the fixed stars has been determined by the extreme accuracy of such observers as Lalande, Lacaille, Bessel, Argelander, and Lamont. The great work of mapping and cataloguing the heavens has been accomplished. Many hundred stars, supposed to be single fixed stars, have been ascertained to be double stars, and some have been resolved into systems like our own. The 300-400, observed by Struve, have grown, through the labors of Herschel, in both the Northern and the Southern hemispheres, at the Cape of Good Hope, and elsewhere, to over 3000, and the number is constantly increasing. Nebulae have been analyzed, and been shown to consist of worlds distinct and perfect as our own. Thus ttere is a steady and perceptible advance in man's conception of the Earth, of Nature, of what we call the World and the Universe, though each individual, generation, and century are but dimly conscious of this progress.

The Earth as the Dwelling-place of Man.

The Earth draws our attention to itself, however, not as simply a unit in the planetary system, but as the home of the human race. The physical description of the globe includes the relations of the Earth as a star amid the heavenly hosts, while Geography, taken most comprehensively, regards the Earth as the dwelling place of Man. From a geographical point of view, the world becomes to us the common home of our race, the theater, not of the operations of Nature in the most unrestricted sense, but the arena for the development of human life and history. The whole animate and inanimate creation is tributary, looked at geographically, to the fashioning of the destiny of Man. Without Man as the central point. Nature would have no interest to the geographer; without the Earth, constituted just as it is, the races of men and the course of [j

INTRODUCTION. XV

human history could not claim his attention. The Earth is not only the best known of planets, but, as the home of man, infinitely the most interesting. The study of it is at the foundation of history as much as of physics.

No man of science can fail to regard it with the deepest interest.

More than a hundred years ago, George Foster remarked that European culture had ascended to that height, that it must include an intimate knowledge of all that is peculiar in the features and phenomena of the entire globe. How much more true is this remark in the middle of our nineteenth century! It is no longer European culture that demands this, but the welfare of all countries claims of scholars this knowledge far more imperatiyely than a hundred years ago. Still, it must be confessed that we are far from the attainment of a perfect science of Geography, in its largest sense ; the science which regards the Earth as the field of human discipline; the science of which what was formerly called Geography is only an outlying, rudimentary part. The compass of what it holds as its goal is too large, and its contents too varied for his grasp whose existence is hemmed in by narrow bonds, and whose life is so brief. And though there have always been detailed descriptions of the diff'erent parts of the earth, many of them remarkable for their accuracy, yet there has been lacking a knowledge of the principle of organic unity which pervades the whole, and the mutual play and interdependency of all the parts. The whole subject of relations was unstudied. And it is a knowledge of the relations of things that leads to a scientific interpretation, not the description of detached parts. Geography was. and continued to be mere description, not the teaching of the most important relations. Only now are we beginning to comprehend the true elements of geographical science, only now are the first efforts made to deal profoundly with this science, although the progress of discovery is still going on with unabated speed, leaving far behind us all thiB advances of our predecessors.

Geogkaphy as a Science.

The Earth, considered per se, is only a fragment of the Universe,

of the Kosmos, in that wide use of the word which Humboldt has to speak, of Nature; the home, or rather the cradle, of men and of

XVI INTRODUCTION.

nations, the dwelling-place of our race. It is not merely a region of immense spaces, a vast superficies, it is the theater where all the forces of Nature and the laws of Nature are displayed in their variety 'and independencies. Besides this, it is the field of all human efiort, and the scene of a Divine revelation. The Earth must be studied, therefore, in a threefold relation: to the Universe, to Nature, to History.

And it is not only as a mere passive agent, but active, that it assumes this threefold relation. It is an inseparable, an integral, a working member in the great system of things. But higher than this, and grander than its relation to the system of things, is its relation to an unseen world, to an unseen hand, even that of the Creator. We view it not as the field of forces and laws and phenomena, but the crowning gift of God, displaying the tokens of perfect adaptation to our wants, full of beauty and excellence — a revelation of Divine wisdom, in the form of a visible world. How beautifully has the inspired David painted this in the 104th Psalm !

In relation to its inhabitants, crowned with the Imperial gift of reason, the Earth is not merely the place where they may stand, the cradle where they may sleep, the home where they may live, it is the school where they may be trained. This is one of the first and one of the greatest lessons that we learn from the history of the race. The Earth finds its highest mission, not in its relation to inanimate nature, but to the world of intelligence — the minds that dwell upon it, the spiritual world to which it gives bodies. And as the Earth alone of the planets is adapted to be the home of such a being as man, so in our world of animate and inanimate things, man alone partakes* of a moral nature, incapable of being shared or even imitated by the lower creatures. The Earth was made to be the home of mind, soul, character. And Man was created to make this earth tributary to his largest growth in mind, and soul, and character. In this sense the Earth and its noble possessors are correlative. Each individual rises to his own appointed work, runs his own course, uses all the appliances of Nature, all the help with which God invests him, and then ceases from his mission here; but the Earth remains, the home of the advancing millions, helping them all onward, and granting them new power to fulfill the noble purposes of human life.

Nor can this constitution of things be the result of a happy aoci-

INTRODUCTION. XVU

dent. Evidently under the supreme power of a Divine mind and will, Nature is made subservient to Man. That mutual working and interdependence of things, which opens to our comprehension the History of our race, cannot be ascribed to a fortuitous combination of events. It can only be the result of Divine Providence. Had there been no wise ruling of the blind forces of nature, no subjection of the rough, unbridled powers of the air, and sea, and earth, the human race would have become extinct, as so many races of beasts have done. But there are no traces of the extinction of a human race in our Paleontology. The constitution of the globe is incontestably coincident with a plan to preserve and perfect Man. - There are destructive agencies, it is true, but they do not operate on an extended scale; our earthquakes, and volcanoes, and great storms at sea affect but a fraction of the race, they are no longer universal in their action; while, on the contrary, the instrumentalities which favor mankind remain in force — the earth's changeless garment of green, the uniform progress of generation among subordinate creatures, the ease of acclimatization, and of transferring seeds and germs, with undiminished fruitfulness, from one region to another. The very agencies which, in the dawn of history, brought death, have been changed to auxiliaries of life with us to-day.

The in vestigation into the relations of the Earth, in this respect, and »• into the organization of all the natural laws and phenomena in their bearing on man, his life and history, must constitute a prominent department of true geographical science. When Geography ceases to be a lifeless aggregate of unorganized facts, and becomes the science which deals with the earth as a true organization, a world capable of constant development, carrying in its own bosom the seeds of the future, to germinate and unfold, age after age, it first attains the unity and wholeness of a science, and shows that it grows from a living root ; it becomes capable of systematic exposition, and takes its true place in the circle of sister sciences. Philosophy gladly grants it a share in its own domain, and permits it to indulge in those soaring speculations, which it used to be thought that so simple a thing as Geography might not enjoy. Yet, it must not be denied that there has for some time been felt a need of bringing tlie earth, as an organization, more into the light of scientific investigation. The study of final causes, the tracing of infinite • B* 3

XVIU INTRODUCTION.

wisdom in the works of the Creator, the theories touching the first issue of all things, have grown out of this necessity. Many errors have, doubtless, drifted in during the course of these speculations, man has undertaken to measure the Divine plan with most imperfect data, and the illusion has been too fondly cherished of attaining final and profound results while men were scarcely in the possession of the elements of knowledge. It is for us, therefore, to enter upon our inquiries with investigation rather than theory, to test the knowledge of which tradition has put us in possession, and to advance, as we may, to the new and the unexplored.

Man is the first token that we meet, that our study of the earth must contemplate it as an organized whole, its unity consummating in him. As every individual must, in his own career, epitomize the history of the race, childhood, youth, manhood, and decrepitude, so each man mirrors in his own life the locality where he lives. Whether dwelling in the North or in the South, in the East or in the West, whether the shepherd of the Tyrolese Highlands, or the Hollander of the plains, every man is, in a manner, the representative of the home that gave him birth. In the people the country finds its reflection. The effect of the district upon the nature of its inhabitants in size and figure, in color and temperament, in speech and mental characteristics, is unmistakable. Hence the almost infinite diversity in the peculiarities of culture and attainment, as well as of tendency in different nations. Anthropology and Ethnography, the science of man and of race, are the running commentaries of Geography and Topography. The historian and the geographer work toward each other, — the historian going back from the acts of men to study the scenes which have conditioned their life, the geographer going forward from the study of the habitat of men to that of their deeds. The fundamental question of history is, in fact, AVhat relation does the country bear to the national life? What relation to the civil structure, the state?

In fact, the whole constitution of Man is thoroughly connected with the Earth on which he dwells ; the roots of his being run down into it in uncounted numbers. Man receives at birth from the earth not only a spiritual but a physical dowry, from which he cannot free himself, and of whose worth he becomes conscious more and more. It is, therefore, of course one of the first of the legitimate studies to learn the limits of the realm which Man makes his home, and to

INTRODUCTION. XIX

understand all its secrets, all its forces, so as to turn them to his own uses. Thus alone can he compass the sublime thought of his own freedom, the independence of his own will in the kingdom of Nature, and learn the majesty of his own spirit; for the knowledge of that freedom, which is the most noble of all God's gifts to him, is the most direct key to the attainment of that place in the present, and that destiny in the future, which God has appointed for man. Without a preliminary training, amid the conditions of a limited life, can there be no step taken toward the enjoyment of the life without limitations which is to come. Without the capacity of breaking the higher law, there is no glory in obeying it, no freedom to be valued, even in the world of thought. There can be no true speculation, no philosophy of the unlimited and eternal, without inquiry into and knowledge of the limited and conditioned. He who knows not the earthy, cannot know the heavenly; he who knows not the finite, cannot know the infinite. Statement and counter-statement are the substance to the world of thought. Pythagoras investigated matters of number and weight, before he dealt with the mysteries of metaphysical speculation. Plato thought on the human soul, and the practical details of legislation, before he gave himself to the deepest things of Philosophy. Aristotle was a naturalist and physicist, before he became a logician and metaphysician. Kant was a mathematician and astronomer, before he dealt with the problems of transcendental science. Schelling went from natural philosophy to the study of the soul of things. If there have been evil results from this, it has not been from antedating jaetapliysical studies by physical, but by passing too quickly from the solid foundation-stones to the more unstable heights of the transcendental. Without these solid foundation-stones, philosophy falls, crushed by its own weight; but with this preparation, we may advance to the loftiest and yet most secure speculations.

What Geographt as a Science has tet to accomplish. Geography can just as little be contented with being a mere description of the Earth, and a catalogue of its divisions, as a detailed account of the objects in nature can take the place of a thorough and real natural history. The very word Geography, meaning a description of the Earth, has unfortunately been at fault, and has misled the world: to us it merely hints at the elements, the

XX INTRODUCTION.

factors of what is the true science of Geography. That science aims at nothing less than to embrace the most complete and the most cosmical view of the Earth; to sum up and organize into a beautiful unity all that we know of the globe. The whole body of facts revealed by past and present discovery must be marshaled into harmony, before we gain the high pinnacle of Geographical Science. The Earth, in all its parts, must be known in all its relations, before we can speak of it as the scholars of our day ought to speak of the world they inhabit.

Moreover, the Earth is to be considered in two main relations — a relation, and an absolute relation; that is, we are to regard it in its connection with the greater whole, of which it forms a part, the Universe, and as a body standing alone, existing, as it were, for itself. It is the latter view which falls within the strict province of Geography. The very prominence of the old Greek word J« indicates the pre-eminence which, in this science, our own planet, rather than others, receives. Ge-ography confines our attention to the Earth, and concentrates it upon the globe, regarded per se, rather than in its relations to the Universe. Taken, therefore, strictly, as already hinted at in the foregoing remark, Geography is the department of science that deals with the globe in all its features, phenomena, and relations, as an independent unit, and shows the connection of this unified whole with man and with man's Creator. Should we go beyond this, and discuss the relations of the Earth to the Universe, (as is often done in our geographical treatises, in a singularly imperfect and unfruitful manner,) we should outrun the strict bounds of a single science, and should be encroaching on the domain of the sister science of astronomy. This we have no right to do. Yet, from time to time, we must borrow the results of other departments of learning to confirm our own. The field which we have to till has been immensely reduced in its proportions by the publication of "Kosmos," which great work has almost exhausted the subject of the earth in its external relations- The limiting of our own department may, perhaps, give more opportunity for thorough investigation within itself.