Comparative geography

by Carl Ritter

From these three groups our ordinary text-books compile their usual aggregate of facts, and each becomes after its own pattern a motley in miniature. They contain variable quantities of this triple mass of materials, and follow no law but the demands of the time when they see the light; they favor, like our light literature, the whim of the hour, and are political, military, or commercial, as the public may demand. A systematic exposition of geography is very seldom to be found in them. A harmony of parts, a true harmony, is very rarely attained in their pages. They are at the foundation only arbitrary and unmethodical collections of all facts which are ascertained to exist throughout the earth. They are arranged according to countries, or great natural divisions; but the relation of one great natural division to another, the mutual and immense influence of one country on another, is never mentioned. The description of Europe follows in them to-day the same order in which Strabo set the pattern. The facts are arranged as the pieces of a counterpane, as if every one existed in itself and for itself, and had no connections with others. The setting out of these facts follows the rubrical method of grouping, according to boundary, soil, mountains, rivers, products, and cities. The beginning is usually made with boundaries which are generally most unstable and uncertain, instead of being made with some rudimental fact around which all others arrange themselves as a center.

If we compare these geographical treatises with those made in the interest of any other great department, we shall speedily discover that they indicate knowledge rather than science; they form a mere aggregation and index of rich materials, a lexicon rather than a true text-book. And therefore ensues, despite the undenied interest of the subject and its high claims, the mechanical and unfruitful method only too common—the crowding of the memory without judgment, without thought; thence comes it that Geography has taken so low a place among our school studies, worthy only of the youngest of the pupils, and presenting little stimulus even to them.

It will be my effort, in the course of these lectures, to exhibit the subject of relations rather than to detain you with descriptions; in one word, to generalize rather than to add new details. In the lack of a thoroughly excellent text-book of geography, I shall presuppose an acquaintance on your part with the materials, so to speak, of which the science is to be constructed.

It has been a customary method to treat geography in connection with epochs of time; dealing with it as it was in the past and as it is in the present. We hear of Ancient Geography, the Geography of the Middle Ages, and Modern Geography. In this course of lectures, it will be treated not as the property of one age or another, but rather as a growth of all time, from Herodotus down to our day. It is only in this way that we can ascertain what is permanent and what is ephemeral; only in this way can we subject geography to that comparative method which has given such an impetus to the advancement of the sister sciences of Natural History; only in this way can we see how the present is the birthright of the past. Archæology, ethnography, and civil science are all gainers by this method of treatment; in one word, the whole domain of cotemporaneous study. The less positive knowledge we possess of the formative processes of science, the more crude our hypotheses, the more flagrant our errors. This is constantly verified under our eyes; the errors of the past are the wisdom of the present, and the gradual upheavals of our knowledge become indices, not less of outgrown untruths than of truths yet to be revealed.

Sources of Geographical Science.

The sources of geography, as of history, are twofold—established memorials and continued investigations. The study of it has this great advantage at the outset, that the surface of the earth is a standing monument of the past. We are obliged to search where all lies open; where investigation must be crowned with success. No manuscripts in this great library have perished; they all exist as legible, as accessible as ever. Moreover, personal investigation must be made by every student in order to understand the results of the investigations of others. Wherever our home is, there lie all the materials which we need for the study of the entire globe. Humboldt hints at this when he says in his Kosmos: “Every little nook and shaded corner is but a reflection of the whole of Nature.” The roaring mountain brook is the type of the thundering cataract; the geological formations of a single little island, suggest the broken coast lines of a continent; the study of the boulders which are so thickly scattered in token of a great primeval deluge from the north, reveals the structure of whole mountain chains. The digging of every well may contribute to our knowledge of the earth’s crust; the excavations made in the building of railroads may, without the loss of time, labor, and expense, be a ceaseless source of instruction. In the structure of a spear of grass, of a rush, of a single monocotyledon, may be studied in miniature the palm-tree, prince of the tropics; in the mosses and lichens on our walls, the stunted growths of mountain tops may be investigated. A small range of hills may be taken as the type of the loftiest Cordillera. The eye may be easily trained to see all the greater in the less. The study of our own district is the true key to the understanding of the forms and the phenomena of foreign lands. Whoever has wandered through the valleys and woods, and over the hills and mountains of his own State, will be the one capable of following a Herodotus in his wanderings over the globe. He, and he alone, will be able, with true appreciation, to accompany travelers through all foreign lands. The very first step in a knowledge of geography is to know thoroughly the district where we live.

Unfortunately the text-books which we now possess do not discuss, with any approach to exhaustiveness, the districts where their readers live; and hence they cannot give any true inductive generalization of the large and the remote. In ancient times, the study of geography began with the world of nature, not with the world of books. Herodotus, being 444 years B. C., became, by virtue of his investigations on his wanderings, the first critical geographer of the Greeks. Polybius traveled through the Alps and Pyrenees, Gaul and Spain, to be able to write the history of Hannibal’s campaigns. He explored the Black Sea and Egypt, in quest of facts. He is the father of all military geography; the greatest strategists have busied themselves with writing commentaries on Polybius. Strabo, the most industrious geographer of his age, did not write till he had traveled from the Caucasus to the Rhone, and from the Alps to Ethiopia.

Philip Cluver, of Dantzig, who died in 1623, the true founder of classical geography, collected, by personal investigations, the materials of his great work on Germany, Italy, and ancient Sicily, all of which countries he traversed thoroughly, the classic authors in his hand.

Alexander von Humboldt has become, by his thorough studies of nature in Europe, Asia, and America, the founder of Comparative Geography. He was thoroughly acquainted with every geographical form in the neighborhood of his home, before he traveled into foreign lands. These examples show that personal investigation is one of the most reliable of all sources of geographical knowledge.