COMPARATIVE GEOGRAPHY. BY CARL RITTER LATE PROFESSOR OF GEOGRAPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN. Translated for the Use of Schools and Colleges BY WILLIAM L. GAGE. PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 1865. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE. The translator of Ritter’s “Geographical Studies,” which has received in its English dress the hearty greeting of our most cultured scholars, takes a renewed pleasure in giving to the students of our higher Seminaries a second volume from the pen of the great Geographer. The former work, addressed, as its contents mainly were, to the members of the Royal Academy of Berlin, was too recondite in thought and too abstruse and elaborate in statement ever to become, whether in German or in English, a popular work; but the present volume—the bright, compact crystal of Ritter’s life—will pass into a general circulation, and will be recognized as not merely a simple and perfectly intelligible treatise, but as a masterly application of the comparative method of Geography, and as philosophical as it is practical and interesting. Besides the voluminous Erdkunda, which deals almost exclusively with Asia, and treats it with an exhaustive fullness, Ritter has left the world the volume already referred to, and three courses of Academical Lectures. One of these courses is now before the reader; one of the remaining two relates to the geography of Europe, and the other to the history of Geographical Science and of Discovery. Of these three courses, a distinguished American scholar[1] has said: “Free from excessive details, systematic, clear, bold, and fresh, they are better fitted to bring up to the mind Ritter, the university instructor, than all his other writings.” This praise is by no means excessive; and the student who shall, with the assistance of a good physical atlas, go through this work, will find himself master of a far larger number of special facts than the size of the volume would indicate; and also of a _science_ of Geography, which subsidizes all detail, and makes it auxiliary to the comprehension of relations no less beautiful and singular than are revealed in the study of the other departments of Nature.