A HUNDRED

YEARS OF
GEOGRAPHY
T. W. FREEMAN A HUNDRED
YEARS OF
GEOGRAPHY

Ο Routledge
j j j ^ ^ Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1961 by Transaction Publishers

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2006052040

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Freeman, Thomas Walter.
A hundred years of geography / T. W. Freeman
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-202-30920-0 (alk. paper)
1. Geography—History. I. Title.

G99.F7 2007
910.9Ό34—dc22
2006052040

ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30920-0 (pbk)

 For
Gerald R. Crone
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE 9
Ι. CHANGING GEOGRAPHY II
A century of progress ; six trends of geography ; specializa-
tion and generalization
2. GEOGRAPHY FROM THE M I D - N I N E T E E N T H CENTURY . 26
T h e mid-century challenge ; the regional approach ; some
systematic studies ; the advance of cartography ; the 1870's
3. EXPLORATION AND EDUCATION : T H E WORK OF THE
SOCIETIES FROM 1 8 2 0 ΤΟ 1 9 0 0 49
T h e earlier foundations ; geographical societies after 1880 ;
the academic possibilities
4. GEOGRAPHY IN THE EARLY T W E N T I E T H CENTURY . 69
T h e physical basis ; environmental determinism ; the idea
of the region ; economic and political geography ; geography
in 1914
5. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 96
T h e growth of geomorphology ; the cycle of erosion ; lime-
stone landscapes ; glaciation ; general comment
6. T H E REGIONAL APPROACH . . . . 118
Regions and regionalism ; the idea of the natural region ;
the problem of regional geography
7. ECONOMIC FACTORS IN GEOGRAPHY . . . 145
' Commercial ' and ' economic' geography ; natural re-
sources ; the use of resources ; agricultural changes
8. SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY . . . . . 173
M e n and environment ; a time of broad views ; man and
the land; urban geography ; on the outlook
9. POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY . . . . . 205
T h e attraction of political geography ; the 1914-18 war
and after ; geopolitics
10. T H E ADVANCE OF CARTOGRAPHY . 226
Maps from firms and individuals ; atlases of the nineteenth
century and later ; national atlases
11. N E I T H E R A B E G I N N I N G N O R AN E N D . . . 246
Geographers and their work ; the attraction of geography ;
some comments on geographical method
N O T E S AND REFERENCES . 267
APPENDIX : SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF GEOGRAPHERS . 303
INDEX . 327

7
 PREFACE

T
HE history of geography is not an over-tilled field, and this
book deals only with some aspects of its development in
the past hundred years. The request to write it came by
post with no preliminary warning but never was a task more
happily accepted, for it offered an opportunity of reading much
that was written in the nineteenth century and of observing the
steady growth of geographical work in a rapidly changing world.
One wonders, for example, how great the influence of geographical
arguments on the Treaty of Versailles really was, and to what
extent geopolitical thinking paved the way for the war of 1939-45.
The impetus given to geography by colonial expansion in the late
nineteenth century is clear, and it cannot be accidental that the
growth of geography has been notable since 1919. Much could be
done by a series of national geographical histories, of which one for
the United States is promised already. Equally, there is a need for
more biographies of geographers of various periods.
No subject, perhaps, can more justly claim to be international,
and though this book is written with a basis of British geography,
the debt of British geographers to the continental European
pioneers, particularly in France and Germany, is heavy. In recent
years, the marked advance of American geography has been fruitful
in Europe : among the smaller nations fine work has been done,
conspicuously by the Finns and Swedes. For the future, many
hopes rest with the university and other geographers in Asia,
Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand, not least
because their home territories are being rapidly changed and un-
doubtedly will be transformed in the next few generations.
It is usual for an author to thank his colleagues and other
friends for help, but the main acknowledgement is to those who
have facilitated escape into the monastic seclusion of library, study
and garden. It is only fair to add that the views expressed are
personal, and do not implicate the friend to whom this book is
affectionately dedicated. A word of gratitude must be given to the
small Honours class in Manchester who patiently listened to this
book as a lecture course; possibly this book will help students of
9
 A HUNDRED Y E A R S OF GEOGRAPHY

the day and graduates of an earlier time to see that there is no

binding orthodoxy of view, no one geographer who was always
right but rather a number of faithful workers and thinkers. If this
book had a sub-title, it might be ' no new idea under the sun ' for
many ideas are produced, ignored, and revived fifty years or so
later with good results. But such a sub-title would be unfair—for
new methods and ideas are constantly being tried. And there is the
hope for the future.
T. w. FREEMAN.
The University, Manchester.
January ig6i

io
 C H A P T E R O N E

CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

A
ÎYONE who earns his living by teaching geography has to
endure the comment that his subject is ' new \ though in fact
it goes back to the beginnings of learning as many historians
of geography have shown. Its roots lie in the natural curiosity of
people about places and ways of living other than their own, and at
least from the days of Herodotus explor ers and military conquerors
wrote down what they saw for the benefit of governments and of a
wider circle of readers. Speculation about the nature of the world,
its shape, size and qualities goes back to the ancient Egyptians
who viewed the sky as a kind of ceiling supported above the earth
by four pillars corresponding to the cardinal points. In the
third century B.c., Eratosthenes of Alexandria accepted the Greek
view that the earth was a sphere with a diameter of some 25,000
miles.
The woes of Galileo and the fears of Columbus's sailors came
from the medieval belief in a flat earth, but the darkness of the Dark
Ages is often exaggerated for in fact the knowledge of the world
was increasing all the time : explorers seeking conquest, trade or
merely adventure, went forth and left accounts of their journeys
and observations for posterity. It is not with the thousands of years
of geography that this book deals—indeed, there are already fine
histories available1—but rather with the last hundred years only.
At the outset, however, it is well to realize that so much has gone
before : during the past hundred years, more and more people have
referred to themselves as ' geographers but in many past genera-
tions people have been geographers in fact if not in name. One
need pay little attention to those who designate themselves as
belonging to the third (or second) generation of British geogra-
phers, for the shades of Hakluyt, Mary Somerville and many more
in dumb rebuke.
11
 A I I U N I ) R E D Y E A R S OF GEOGRAPHY

A Century of Progress
The past hundred years have seen a vast growth of geographical
knowledge. This has come through the opening-up of the world
by conquest, trade, missionary enterprise and exploration, and
above all through the provision of quick transport by steamship,
railway and aeroplane. Within a century the population of the
world has been doubled, vast new lands have been settled, the
political maps altered almost beyond recognition, and new ideolo-
gies given practical expression in government and allied social
policies. One may question the validity of the view of a British
geographer, C. B. Fawcett, that the last hundred years are of more
significance than all previous history, yet one is bound to recognize
that the changes have been revolutionary. In the Rede Lecture of
1958,2 Sir Charles Darwin noted that more minerals had been
removed from the earth during the past forty years than in all
previous time and that though the world's farmlands were produc-
ing more, the increase in food had not kept pace with the increase
in people. It may be a difficult world to live in, but it is hardly a
dull one.
Against such a background a great mass of raw material has
been provided for geographical study. Raw material is always raw,
and its discriminating use has depended on the growth of educa-
tion in schools and universities and on the provision of scholars to
use the rich resources available. The talented amateur, the
critically-minded explorer, the natural scholar of independent
means, have all existed and become known as geographers, but the
real modern growth of the subject came with the recognition given
by universities, in not a few cases reluctantly and even under the

Many of the world's early geographical societies regarded educa-

tional advance as essential to their work, though their main purpose
was to encourage exploration and to gather up the fruits of enter-
prising penetration of the remoter areas of the world. Some, how-
ever, had other aims—in fact, as shown in chapter three there is
no such thing as a standard geographical society. Perhaps it is just
as well. Geography is by no means unique in its recent penetra-
tion of many of the world's universities ; many other subjects,
notably economics and the social studies, have only a comparatively
short history of university recognition, and as shown on page 19,
there have been demands for greater facilities for study by those
12
 CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

responsible for several subjects in Britain quite recently. New

opportunities were offered for geographical work, at varying times
in different countries, as part of a general broadening of university
education.
In the pages that follow, an attempt has been made to give an
outline history of the modern growth of geography with a dis-
cussion of various aspects of the subject. It is not proposed to solve
all the great controversies that have arisen, nor to advocate any
particular view or doctrine : many of these are of considerable
interest, even fascination, and some of them are obviously rooted
in a divergence of views on life in general. In our own times both
Fascism and Communism have been geographically expressed :
the former brought arguments for spread of a greater Germany
and the latter is prominent m Russian economic geographies which
maintain how vastly beneficial all the rearrangements of population
and the undeniable intensification of economic activity must be.
Looking further back, the differences of outlook between Ritter
and von Humboldt have been ascribed partly to the former's con-
ception of a divine purpose in all existence, and the latter's more
cautious and in some ways neutral approach to theological prob-
lems. Much of the stimulus to geographical inquiry in the nine-
teenth century came from the Darwinian hypothesis, and especially
from the idea of the adaptation of organisms to environment with
varying success : inspiration was given, too, by the widening of
scientific enterprise, particularly in field study. Mackinder 3 has
claimed that one of the main foundations of Darwin's work was the
appreciation of the geographical distribution of animals under
varied climatic conditions. Some organisms have successfully

notfand in time this had human analogies; for some stocks have
apparently shown greater powers of adaptation in new areas, or
under charged climates, than others. It is a truism that human
life and environment have been intimately interwoven, biologically
and culturally, from the beginning of life on earth, but extreme
claims have been made for environmental influence, notably by
Ellsworth Huntington in his studies of the effects of climate on
human communities, or by some of the more vigorous writers on
the effects of particular types of physical setting, such as mountains,
plains, peninsulas or islands or social and political organization.
Such arguments are tempting. An American writer has shown
that Finnish immigrants have been successful and happy in areas
A IIUNI)RED YEARS OF GEOGRAPHY

similar to those of their homeland, with coniferous forests, number-

less lakes and rivers, and a cold winter. 4 Chisholm 5 in 1916 drew
attention to the dangers of generalizations : he quoted a statement
that ' nations that are accustomed to a limited territory, as were the
Greeks, always search for a similar limited area ' by pointing out
that the Greeks spread successfully on the broad lowlands of much
of western Asia under Alexander the Great. Equally he criticized
Buckle for saying that the Indians are condemned to poverty by
the physical laws of their climate, or that civilizations outside
Europe were through the influence of ' nature ' liable to possess
imaginative faculties at the expense of reason. Nevertheless, such
questions as the way of life of European settlers in the tropics and
their powers of acclimatization are of considerable interest: there
can be no harm in asking why the Japanese have never settled in
large numbers in areas with cold winters, such as Manchuria,
when the opportunities were available to them. Chisholm favoured
caution in any effort to explain human life in environmental terms,
and quotes with approval the statement of Jean Brunhes that
4
every truth concerning the relations between natural surroundings
and human activities can never be anything but approximate; to
represent it as something more exact than that is to falsify it, is to
become anti-scientific in the highest degree5. To search for a
general law is a fascinating exercise, but Chisholm apparently
thought it a wiser policy to look for empirical laws, which could be
expressed by percentages or other numerical statements.
In its present development, geography owes much to the work
done in the past hundred years. Apart from a vast accession of
material, there has been a good deal of thought on its relevance and
on the methods of study likely to produce good results. No subject
can retain academic standing merely by announcing its methods of
work, but only by carrying them out and letting the results speak
for themselves, or, failing that, by asking the right questions even
if no final answers can be given. Any study concerned with the
distribution of population over the world, past, present and even
possibly future, must be of relevance. There is no need to restrict
investigation to areas at present occupied, as even areas of perma-
nent ice and snow may become significant for temporary occupa-
tion or for air routes, and with modern resources life at the south
pole can be made quite tolerable, at least for a time. It is a not
uncommon academic experience that someone begins to study
something merely for interest, only to discover in the end that it
14
 CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

becomes of great significance : it is also true that an idea may be put

forward, widely accepted and applauded, but finally swept into
oblivion. Another idea may attract little attention, but become
popular—even fashionable-—many years later: various examples
are given in this book of such a nature. In cynical moments, the
pi esent author has thought that there are few new ideas in modern
geography, but rather a number of old ones that have been put
fox ward, forgotten, revived and in some cases used to good pur-
pose. The modern interest in medical geography or in colonial
study is following lines of inquiry suggested eighty or more years
ago: modern physical geographers are considering matters that
puzzled the pioneers of the American geological surveys in the
days before W. M. Davis. Land use surveys of towns seem
extremely modern until one remembers that some were done more
than a hundred years ago. But here has been a vast increase in
research work, and the present range of inquiry is well shown by
the recent French and American reviews of recent publications. 6
Much of the modern impetus was given by the 1914-18 war and
the subsequent treaties. While it is clear that the re-drawing of
the map of Europe was done partly with map evidence, including
such distributions as those of nationality, language, and communi-
cations, the full story has not been told, though presumably the
diaries and other private papers of Isaiah Bowman, when released,
may prove informative. 7 Before the war, geography was already
strongly established in France and Germany and a useful begin-
ning had been made in Britain and America : speaking of Britain,
II. J. Mackinder 8 said in 1935 that 4 the half-dozen years before
the Great War may perhaps be regarded as the divide between the
dominance of the old and the oncoming in strength of the new
kinds of geographical activity The splendid survey by W. L. G.
Joerg 9 of European geography in 1922 showed that there was an
excellent foundation for the advanced teaching of the subject in
many universities : long taught for its practical value to students of
commerce and for its general interest to others, including intending
teachers, geography was now able to attract specialists in Britain
as in France and Germany. In this critical phase of development,
many British scholars turned to French writers for guidance on
method, though before 1914 some such as Herbertson and A. G.
Ogilvie had studied in German universities : after 1918, German
geographers once more influenced British geographers, but in
time the pulsating activity of American geography gave stimulus
1
5
 A IIUNI)RED Y E A R S OF GEOGRAPHY

[914-18 and ι of its most dis-

of this that they
partly as a means of fostering support of the
and of liberal views on race relations. On a
, the congresses of the :

as the world mapping on the 1:1,000,000 scale (p. 67) or a

of land use (p. 169-71).

as part of a
aally by many of the Societies,
by no means all—of the:
trend. Third, the practical value of geography in
; the potentialities of new lands and their problems led to

of agricultural fife^ rainfall distribution and

periodicity, and even conditions of health : this, in a
may be termed the colonial trend. Fourth, efforts to trace a world
. this activity
back into the early part of the nineteenth century, it was
in the early twentieth : it was a trend, or
7, to generalization. Fifth, during and after the 1914-18
as in the works of some writers before it, the "
16
 CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

and

, in effect, one of ,
with a varying degree of perspi-
of the early compendili ms of geography, such as
Geography, are full of facts and essential in
Much of the knowledge of such areas as
from the careful recording of journeys by
geography in its modern form
could not have existed at all. The attraction of
journeys into previously unknown
siderable, and the lectures of Livingstone, Stanley and
travellers were thronged. Almost everyone is at some time thrilled
by the account of an expedition to Everest, or a few months in the
Antarctic, though the last area has now become a field of great
scientific enterprise. Thirty years ago one listened to Antarctic
lectures as adventures of fit young men with some interest in
birds and glaciology : now one listens to accounts of the
national Geophysical Year. Livingstone and other
were pathfinders: 10 he gives in his works much curious infor-
mation, for example that 4 intercourse with departed spirits ' is
considered witchcraft, or that ' the people seem to live in abun-
dance. They have rice growing among the native corn. Only
some of the women wear the rings in the lips. The rest are
good looking. We never were visited by more mosquitoes than
here '. Such an area, on the Zambezi, would now be

anthropologists.

people were tiring of such stuff, and a group of French j

founded the Annales de géographie with an academic purpose and
the aim of avoiding 'nouvelles à sensation' (p. 62): even so, there
are still many people who are impressed by tales of remote regions,
though nowadays this kind of curiosity is likely to be best satisfied
by underwater photography on the television screen. Opportuni-
ties of travel are always of value, but there is a quaint view among
some people that one cannot be a proper geographer unless one has
visited some area of great remoteness, and there are still people who
proudly assert that they have been all the way to Timbuktu. In
1899, FI. J. Mackinder made the first ascent of Mount Kenya,
17
 A IIUNI)RED YEARS OF GEOGRAPHY

having decided that he must do something of the kind because

' most people would have no use for a geographer who was not an
adventurer and explorer5.11 But it is not by Mount Kenya that
Mackinder is now remembered : the main phase of exploration has
passed, and by 1914 the only major unexplored area outside the
polar areas was Arabia.
In education, geography has often been advocated as a 4 bridge 5
subject between science and the humanities : Thomas Arnold of
Rugby12 said in 1842 [sic] that 'a real knowledge of Geography
embraces at once a knowledge of the earth and of the dwellings of
man upon it ; it stretches out one hand to history, and the other to
geology and physiology : it is just that part of knowledge where the
students of physical and of moral science meet together \ The
early educational efforts of the Royal Geographical Society cul-
minated in the famous Scott Keltic report which reviewed the
position to the 1880's. Writing in 1913 on ' Thirty years progress
in geographical education', Scott Keltic13 noted that from 1905 the
new secondary grammar schools had included geography as a major
subject, that there were advances in the primary schools and in the
training colleges for teachers. At this time, the real lack was
suitable teaching in British universities comparable to that avail-
able in France and Germany. In Germany, 14 many early efforts
were made but in 1893, it was urged at the annual Education Con-
gress that geography should be taught in all classes of the gymnasia
and similar institutions : the Germans at that time regarded the
French as more enterprising, particularly from the 1870's (p. 46).
Many of the pioneer modern geographers devoted much of their
time to the encouragement of school-teaching, to extra-mural
lecturing and to arranging summer schools : in Britain, for example,
A. J. Herbertson, L. W. Lyde, II. J. Mackinder, FI. R. Mill,
M. I. Newbigin, E. G. R. Taylor and many more wrote textbooks,
and even W. M. Davis in America did similar work. Academics of
a later age generally leave the writing of textbooks to the school-
teachers—though there are exceptions.
It is not possible, nor perhaps necessary, in this book to review
the whole process of geographical education, but two observations
must be made. The first is that in many schools in Britain—un-
fortunately by no means all—there has been a great recent advance
in field-work tours, on some of which a great deal of original work
has been done. The idea is not new—indeed there are records of
such enterprises nearly eighty years ago: Scott Keltic,15 for
18
 CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

example, recorded in 1886 that the boys of Gordon's Hospital,

Aberdeen, were 'taken out to the country, and in a simple, rough,

to draw maps of a small area for themselves'. No doubt they en-

joyed it much more than answering such questions as one in the
Cambridge Junior examination of 1884, 4 A person sets free seven
carrier pigeons at Limerick to go to Belfast, Cork, Kildare, Kil-
kenny, Killarney, Tipperary and Waterford respectively. Draw
seven lines from one point to show clearly the directions which
would be taken by birds flying straight from Limerick to these
towns. Which bird would have the longest, which the shortest, to
fly ? ' What educational value memory work of such a character
involves, is not clear. But field-work came in as part of the
' practical ' training in geography, and some form of outdoor
activity or visit can be excellently related to work in the classroom.
A second observation on education16 raises very wide problems
indeed: in 1916, a report was issued after a conference of five
British associations supported by school and other teachers, in
classics, English, history, modern languages and geography.
Recognizing that education must be provided for those of scientific
and technical abilities, the conference urged that there should be a
balance of interests, with provision for both humanistic and scien-
tific studies, and that premature specialization in either field should
be discouraged. Further, there should be an adequate training in
the language and literature, the geography and history, of the
pupil's own country and those beyond it; for the first object in all
education is the training of human beings in mind and character as
citizens of a free country. The modern advance of geography has
been made possible by opportunities for specialization, but every
subject can fructify another.
Colonial enterprise, a third main trend, has been prominent for
the whole of the past hundred years : in recent years, it has perhaps
become more prominent than ever before as various universities
and university colleges in Africa have acquired well-staffed geo-
graphy departments able to tackle local problems with sophisticated
research methods. Interest in Africa arose particularly from the
1870's when various European nations were colonially minded :
Americans at that time were more concerned to develop their own
vast territories. Equally in Canada, Australia and New Zealand
much of the geographical inquiry was related to settlement possi-
bilities, though the Australians showed an interest in New Guinea
19
 A HUNDRED YEARS OF GEOGRAPHY

by the i88o's (p. 57). A large part of the former colonial world

the stream of research work that has come from New Zealand and
hope for more in due course from Australia : significant, too, has
been the work done in South Africa. Canadian enterprise still
includes a good deal of fundamental exploration, partly in
and settlement possibilities, and has obvious points of <
with similar work in the taiga, or northern coniferous forest, of the
Soviet Union. The apparent amelioration of climate in arctic and
subarctic latitudes, on which work has been done by H. W.

northern areas : the Russian and the Canadian geographer may still
feel the satisfaction of penetrating terra incognita, or nearly so. It
would be quite wrong to write as if the whole world were com-
pletely known already, for in fact large parts of it are as yet very
little known, and so far subjected only to investigations of a recon-
naissance character, which must be the prelude to more detailed
work later. As noted on p. 45 the ]
were seen a long time ago, but so far they have only
explored.
A trend towards generalization dates mainly from the early
of this century, but was conceived long before in various
to show world distributions such as those of climatic types
Probably it is essential to all geography teaching
: should be some idea of the world distribution of popula-
tion, of structural belts with their apparently associated landforms,

of the appeal of British geographers such as Herbertson and

Mackinder lay in their broad vision, and several writers have

vestigating climate, such as those of C. W. Thornthwaite17 may

recognition of surfaces o/erosion, Lay mfke schemes of physical

regionalization based on structural elements highly questionable.
And what is true of physical features is no less true of any human
the aplomb with which Ellsworth Huntington ex-

by J. Scott Keltie18 in 1913 when he wrote of him as 7

of the most active and original of <

may perhaps want a little of the
CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

21
 A IIUNI)RED YEARS OF GEOGRAPHY

were concerned particularly with their own resources and prob-

lems, including those of planning industry and agriculture: for
example, some notable work was done in Germany on regional
economic planning.
In time, what may be regarded as the present trend towards
specialization emerged. Perhaps for this reason, when the new
political geography edited by W. G. East and A. E. Moodie called
The Changing World appeared in 1956, it was the work of twenty
authors rather than one omnipresent Bowman. The range of
material available on any aspect of geography has vastly increased,
and consequently researchers and writers are generally working on
a more restricted field than in earlier times. This tendency is seen
perhaps in an extreme form in American Geography—Inventory and
Prospect, which among types of geography includes settlement,
urban, resources, marketing, recreational, manufacturing, medical,
military ; there appear to be twenty-seven varieties—a distinct
change from the days when a university might include in its
courses physical, human, regional with perhaps also economic and
political. But this is an inevitable development: if one looks at the
list of courses in an efficiently-run history honours school, one will
find a surprisingly long list of subdivisions of history and of periods.
And in the lecture-rooms the periods become shorter: indeed one
known to the author covered only five years. Equally a geography
honours school may now have a wide range of regional courses, few
of which will cover areas of continental proportions, as formerly;
and some courses in historical geography will cover only one period
instead of wandering on from palaeolithic times to the twentieth
century. Some look back nostalgically to the days of the ' broad
general culture ' provided, so it seemed, by geography thirty or
forty years ago (and even more recently in places) while others,
including the author, think that the future of geography must lie in
closer study of a more restricted field, but by far more people than
were available a generation ago. Of course there are many teachers
in schools who find what they were taught in a university twenty or
thirty years ago entirely satisfying still : they resemble the lady who
proudly said that she admired her husband so much because he had
never changed his mind about anything since he was eighteen.

Specialization and Generalization

One can only give examples of various studies which show this
increasing specialization. On the physical side one could mention
22
 CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

the fruitful results of long-continued observation of a few glaciers

as indicative of current climatic changes (p. 114), or of the excellent
work done at the Skalling laboratory in Denmark on coastal changes
(p. 116) for many years: other examples include some of the team-
work done, necessarily quickly but none the less efficiently,
after any major disaster such as a large-scale flood (p. 117).
Though the geomorphologist may habitually think in terms of a
million-year time scale, he may see much within a lifetime, or even
within a week. On the human side, one could instance much
patient work such as detailed studies of particular towns, without
which modern theories of urban geography could not have been
made and by which the authenticity of such theories is continually
threatened. Equally in any rural study, it is necessary to reinforce
the statistical material by investigation of individual farms that are
both the producing units and the homes of the people in the
country-side. But perhaps of all changes the most radical is in
regional geography : many now regard the traditional methods of
proceeding from structure to physical features, climate, vegetation,
natural resources, agriculture, industry, population distribution,
types of settlement and the like as beyond the range of any-
one: there is now a widespread tendency to focus such regional
study around some theme such as the distribution of population
and to seek influences in order that some explanation may be
given.
At present the trend towards increasing specialization may
make much geographical reading far less attractive, if more intel-
lectually satisfying, than the broad generalizations of an earlier
time. Many reviewers criticize works by geographers as lacking in
apparent purpose, as being builders' yards from which others may
choose their materials, as failing to substantiate some doctrine
such as the necessity of preserving the countryside, of planning
whole regions rather than single towns, of showing how a world
food shortage may be averted, of advocating some industrial
development in an area of declining economic power—the list is
endless. To some it seems that no great planning problem can be
solved except on a local basis, and that the necessity for such
detailed study has been amply demonstrated by the rapid efforts
of planners in Britain to make adequate surveys of the towns they
propose to ' redevelop Much of this detailed work has raised new
problems, both of research technique and inadequacy of data : for
example in many countries the statistical material is deficient, yet
23
 A HUNDRED Y E A R S OF GEOGRAPHY

who could say that the best possible geographical use is made of
the statistical material available? Jean Gottmann 21 in 1950 said
that 4 the essential problems of our time . . . are permanent prob-
lems ; those of planning and replanning the regions of the earth, of
the compartments and the partitions chequering the continents—
not only the surveying and description of all these, but also a

factors regulating the existing pattern in the organization of space!'

Gottmann prefaces these remarks by saying that the geographers
of the late nineteenth century—such as Ratzel, Vidal de la Blache,
Mackinder and W. M. Davis—laid fine foundations by their pre-
occupation with 4 broad and permanent problems of the world's
partitioning but it has become almost unscientmc to attempt
again to solve the large issues, though this is an age of large issues
the ' geographers have lost a great deal of the prestige and audience
they had half a century ago'. Nevertheless, the success of such
books as L. D. Stamp's Undeveloped World, or of various series of
ummaries of geographical research in Britain and France,
and the wide use of the Land Utilization Survey of Britain for
planning purposes during the last twenty years show that

One problem of which all practising geographers must be con-

is the speed of change in the modern world. The vast
of the urban population in many countries, a varying rate
of suburban spread, the reduction of numbers on the land com-
bined with increasing mechanization in parts of the world, the
development of new resources and the decline of some old-
established manufacturing or mining areas, the growing pressure
of population in some less well-endowed countries, the withdrawal
of people from country-sides where returns are meagre, are among
many changes that may be observed. Changes occur with varying
speed from one country, or even one part of a country, to
but one can only assume that even greater changes
Much survives from former ages : much is changing before our
eyes. In Britain the countryside has many villages and even farm-
houses originally located in Norman times and still there, but in
towns swift and dramatic changes may be seen : for example the
1959 report of the Ministry of Housing and Local
notes that the city of Birmingham has bought an area of 977 ;
at a cost including clearing, of over .£18,000,000, for redevelop-
A visit to Birmingham will show the striking changes on the
 CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

of living.

25