and century are but dimly conscious of this progress. THE EARTH AS THE DWELLING-PLACE OF MAN. 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 whole animate and inanimate creation is tributary, looked at geographically, to the fashioning of the destiny of Man. Without Man as the central point, Nature would have no interest to the geographer; without the Earth, constituted just as it is, the races of men and the course of human history could not claim his attention. The Earth is not only the best known of planets, but, as the home of man, infinitely the most interesting. The study of it is at the foundation of history as much as of physics. No man of science can fail to regard it with the deepest interest. More than a hundred years ago, George Foster remarked that European culture had ascended to that height, that it must include an intimate knowledge of all that is peculiar in the features and phenomena of the entire globe. How much more true is this remark in the middle of our nineteenth century! It is no longer European culture that demands this, but the welfare of all countries claims of scholars this knowledge far more imperatively than a hundred years ago. Still, it must be confessed that we are far from the attainment of a perfect science of Geography, in its largest sense; the science which regards the Earth as the field of human discipline; the science of which what was formerly called Geography is only an outlying, rudimentary part. The compass of what it holds as its goal is too large, and its contents too varied for _his_ grasp whose existence is hemmed in by narrow bonds, and whose life is so brief. And though there have always been detailed descriptions of the different parts of the earth, many of them remarkable for their accuracy, yet there has been lacking a knowledge of the principle of organic unity which pervades the whole, and the mutual play and interdependency of all the parts. The whole subject of _relations_ was unstudied. And it is a knowledge of the relations of things that leads to a scientific interpretation, not the description of detached parts. Geography was and continued to be mere description, not the teaching of the most important relations. Only now are we beginning to comprehend the true elements of geographical science, only now are the first efforts made to deal profoundly with this science, although the progress of discovery is still