History of Geography

We need not attempt any elaborate definition of Geography at this stage; it is hoped that a fairly clear idea of its field and functions may arise during the following brief summary of its history and evolution. The old-fashioned definition, “A description of the earth,” is serviceable enough if accepted in its widest sense. Geography may be regarded as the mother of the sciences. Whatever was the origin of man, whether single or multiple, and wherever he emerged into manhood, he was a wanderer, an explorer, from the first. Necessity compelled him to make himself familiar with his environment and its resources, and as the race multiplied emigration became compulsory. The more that relics of primitive humanity are brought to light, the further back must man’s earliest wanderings be dated. The five thousand years of the old Biblical chronology must be multiplied a hundred times, and still we find that half a million years ago our primitive forefathers must have travelled far from the cradle of the race. They were unconscious geographers. Their conceptions of the earth and of its place in the universe are unknown to us; it is not impossible to infer something of them by analogy of ideas existing to-day among more or less primitive peoples, though to do so is beyond our present scope. Yet it may be said that certain root-ideas of geographical theory and practice must surely date from the earliest period of man’s capacity for observation. Thus the necessity for describing or following a particular direction presupposes the establishment of a definite standard—the face would be turned towards the position of some familiar object; then in that direction and the opposite, and to the right hand and the left, four such standards would be found, and would become the “cardinal points.” The value, for this purpose, of so patent a phenomenon as the rising and setting of the sun must have been impressed upon human intelligence at an elementary stage. Again, map-making is not very far removed from a primitive instinct. Modern travellers have described attempts at cartography by the North American Indians, the Eskimo, and the Maori and other less advanced inhabitants of the Pacific Islands.