going on with unabated speed, leaving far behind us all the advances of our predecessors. GEOGRAPHY AS A SCIENCE. The Earth, considered _per se_, is only a fragment of the Universe, of the Kosmos, in that wide use of the word which Humboldt has given to it in his celebrated work. The Earth is the grand floor, so to speak, of Nature; the home, or rather the cradle, of men and of nations, the dwelling-place of our race. It is not merely a region of immense spaces, a vast superficies, it is the theater where all the forces of Nature and the laws of Nature are displayed in their variety and independencies. Besides this, it is the field of all human effort, and the scene of a Divine revelation. The Earth must be studied, therefore, in a threefold relation: to the Universe, to Nature, to History. And it is not only as a mere passive agent, but active, that it assumes this threefold relation. It is an inseparable, an integral, a working member in the great system of things. But higher than this, and grander than its relation to the system of _things_, is its relation to an unseen world, to an unseen hand, even that of the Creator. We view it not as the field of forces and laws and phenomena, but the crowning gift of God, displaying the tokens of perfect adaptation to our wants, full of beauty and excellence—a revelation of Divine wisdom, in the form of a visible world. How beautifully has the inspired David painted this in the 104th Psalm! In relation to its inhabitants, crowned with the Imperial gift of reason, the Earth is not merely the place where they may stand, the cradle where they may sleep, the home where they may live, it is the school where they may be trained. This is one of the first and one of the greatest lessons that we learn from the history of the race. 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. In this sense the Earth and its noble possessors are correlative. Each individual rises to his own appointed work, runs his own course, uses all the appliances of Nature, all the help with which God invests him, and then ceases from his mission here; but the Earth remains, the home of the advancing millions, helping them all onward, and granting them new power to fulfill the noble purposes of human life.