WHAT GEOGRAPHY OUGHT TO BE.
It was easy to foresee that the great revival of Natural Science which our generation has had the happiness to witness for thirty years, as also the new direction given to scientific literature by a phalanx of prominent men who dared to bring up the results of the most complicated scientific research in a shape accessible to the general reader, would necessarily bring about a like revival of Geography. This science, which takes up the laws discovered by its sister sciences, and shows their mutual action and consequences with regard to the superficies of the globe, could not remain an outsider to the general scientific movement; and we see now an interest awakened in Geography which very much recalls the general interest taken in it by a proceeding generation during the first half of our century. We have not had among us so gifted a traveler and philosopher as Humboldt was; but the recent Arctic voyages and deep-sea explorations, and still more the sudden progress accomplished in Biology, Climatology, Anthropology, and Comparative Ethnography, have given to geographical works so great an attraction and so deep a meaning that the method, themselves of describing the earthball have undergone of late a deep modification. The same high standard of scientific reasoning and philosophical generalisations which Humboldt and Ritter had accustomed us to, reappear again in geographical literature. No wonder,therefore, if works both of travel and of general geographical description are becoming again the most popular kind of reading.
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