Carl Ritter

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the river passes beyond these rocky barriers, and meets with obstructions of a more movable character, it crowds them more gently and gracefully aside, and leaves a path more sinuous and wave-like; and yet more gentle are its curves, as it opens a way through the plains where nothing obstructs its course. The last is strikingly exemplified in the rivers of eastern Europe, especially in all those of middle and southern Russia. The practised eye can determine the structure of the soil with considerable certainty, by merely tracing the course of rivers when represented on a faithful map. ”

“ Though Asia has been the mother of the world, and has sent out so many and so eminent races, it has not been to the depletion of the parent country. In race, figure, color, manner of life, nationality, religion, political and social bonds of union, forms of government, culture, language, it is so richly diversified, that no continent, viewed historically, can be compared to it. Asia seems to have been created to send forth its fruitful scions of life to all the other great divisions of the earth. ”

“ Science alone, the gift and the growth of centuries, can measure the field; science 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 ”

“ And in very truth, a great principle lay in that rude and primitive division; it was in entire harmony with nature, and, up to the latest times and the opening of a new world, in entire harmony with history also. With Asia, the Orient, is connected indissolubly the development of the ancient world; with Europe, that of the modern. The contrast between these two great divisions is wonderfully analogous to that of morning and evening. The whole culture of the West had its root, its beginnings at the East. The East is not merely the place where the sun begins his daily course ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The highest progress of the human race, the complete development of its possibilities, was not possible till man should, in his wanderings from east to west, compass the globe, and take possession of it, not for a day, but for all time. The primitive settlements in Mexico, Peru, and Yucatan could not sustain themselves in consequence of their isolation; navigation was in its rudest stages, and it needed to be in its highest before the world should be bound together closely enough to advance in all its parts toward the goal of a perfect civilization. ”

“ The continents are never to be regarded as high, dead masses of land, but as vital and effective instruments, working upon each other ceaselessly, and helping each other to attain the consummation intended in the counsels of the Divine Mind. The unity of the earth, the unity of the continents, the unity of every physical feature of the continents, and the building all up together in a perfect symmetry and mutual adaptation of parts, is the crowning thought of Geographical Science. ”

“ Or, to compare the continents to a still higher class of forms, Europe may be called the Face of the Old World, out of which the soul of humanity could look more clearly into the great and promising future. ”

“ Within modern times, the island group of Great Britain and Ireland, the richest in harbors, is to the continent what, in ancient times, the Greek peninsula was, with its wealth of inlets, which gave it the command of the Mediterranean. A rich gift this has been to the smallest of the continents of the Old World, to equalize its condition with others. The providential wisdom which “sets one thing over against another,” is clearly manifest in this. Europe, though in the center of the great continental land-mass, becomes the most maritime of all, the most approachable of all ”

“ All the divisions of the earth, taken together in their internal and external connections, in their mutual action and reaction, constitute the unity of the globe, and make apparent that it is a simple organism, designed and created by divine skill, and intended to be the home of a race whose culture should, in the course of centuries, unfold from the most simple beginnings to the most complex and elaborate perfection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As Asia, lying within all the zones, colossal in size, and most plentifully enriched with the gifts of nature, was fitted to be the nursery of supply for all other parts of the world without impoverishing itself; so Europe, limited in size and confined to the temperate zone, but most complex in its subdivision, having a great diversity in its ocean [201] inlets, as well as in its hills, valleys, plateaus, and mountains, yet, without great extremes, has been especially fitted for the reception of stranger races, and for the development of their energies and the advance of their culture. ”

“ The metallic stores of the earth, the vegetable and animal kingdoms were not transferred to any extent from place to place; the sea brought nothing from lands remotely foreign but drift-sand, cocoa-nuts, floating wood, ice masses, and seaweed, swept by the great currents from shore to shore. But now the seas are no barriers; they do not separate the continents but bind them together, and unite the destinies of nations in the closest manner. The great improvements in ocean navigation have entirely changed the relations of the entire globe. ”

“ Yet in this last regard, mountains deserve careful study, for they not only exercise and have exercised a great influence over nature and man, but they serve as our best key to open to our view the internal structure of the earth.
Some mountains, though of great height and broad base, like Etna, Vesuvius, Teneriffe, and many volcanoes, belong to no true mountain system; and even when they lie near together, and yet have no inner principle of unity, they are not spoken of as a chain or a range: they make merely a mountainous district. ”

“ To what nature has given to Europe man has largely added, seeking by means of canals and railways to make the whole continent subject to him and auxiliary to his needs. In this way the interior districts have appropriated to themselves the advantages of the sea-coast, and the distance which it has placed between itself and Asia and Africa has only been increased. Nature first gave Europe its vantage-ground, and man has gone on from that point and doubled the gifts of nature. ”

“ Dashing its way through the most formidable barriers, it is entirely unlike the gentle Ganges, which pursues its tranquil course through the plains, meeting no barrier in its entire length. The Indus, so long as it remains north of the Himalaya, traverses a plateau 10,000 feet above the sea; while the Ganges, even at Delhi, is but 1000 feet above the sea. ”

“ The range of his development is extremely limited, and his character little different, whether in northern Asia or northern America.
America forms the real West of the great land-mass, the true Occident of the earth, young as yet, but to receive as its gift the entire culture of the East, and to advance by giant steps to a position of independent influence. Already it has far surpassed Asia in industry and civilization. The old world was the preparation for the new. Almost everything which the new world enjoys and values was the gift of the old. ”

“ There are some rivers which are entirely independent of tributaries—which pursue their way to the sea entirely alone. Such rivers, however, never belong to the first class; they are always of subordinate magnitude, and the humblest of them are mere coast torrents, like those west of the Andes. Others find their way to no ocean, but lose themselves in an inland sea or lake, as the Volga does in the Caspian; as the Gihon and the Sihon do in the Aral; as the Jordan does in the Dead Sea. Others disappear in sand wastes or in morasses; such are the rivers of the African steppes. ”

“ The Earth has had a development of its own; hence the too common error of treating it as passive and inorganic. The history of the Earth displays, in all the monuments of the past, that it has been subjected in every feature, in every division of itself, to ceaseless transformation, in order to show that, as a whole, it is capable of that organic development on which I lay so much stress. ”

“ The land-locked seas are reduced to insignificance, and their shores are now covered with villages and cities, from the Platten-See of Hungary up to the Caspian and the great lakes of North America.
To sum all up in one word, the mighty influence of Time on the geographical development of the earth is displayed in the clearest manner. But this influence is not the same for all localities on the globe. While there are some people and some places which are left behind, there are others which have made wonderful progress, and have taken and now hold a foremost place. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The earth is, therefore, as was stated in the introduction, a unit, an organism of itself: it has its own law of development, its own cosmical life; it can be studied in no one of its parts and at no special epoch of its history. The past and the future, the near and the remote, are all blended in a system of mutual interdependence, and must be looked at together. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just as the wild horse of Toorkistan has given up his freedom and has become the tame and useful servant of civilization, so this Alpine segment of the globe has changed all its relations to the adjacent countries. The influence of the most stupendous natural objects is weakened every year. The physical dimensions may and do remain unchanged, but their influence on life and on history is undermined by those new conditions which operate so powerfully in freeing man from the dominion of nature. ”