of the South; and the rise of the South-notably of Australia-is the direct result of human agency, on one hand transforming the surface of the land, on the other eliminating distance. The old name of Australia, as we all know, was New Holland. The name was well chosen in view of later history, for while no two parts of the world could be more unlike one another than the little corner of Europe known as Holland, or the Netherlands, and the great Southern Continent, in one and in the other man has been pre-eminently a geographical agency.

The writer who used this phrase, "Man is a geographical agency," the American writer, Mr. G. P. Marsh, published his book, "Man and Nature," in 1864, and a new edition, entitled "The Earth as Modified by Human Action," in 1874. He was mainly concerned with the destructiveness of man in the geographical and climatic changes which he has effected. "Every plant, every animal," he writes, "is a geographical agency, man a destructive, vegetables, and in some cases even wild beasts, restorative powers"; and again: "It is in general true that the intervention of man has hitherto seemed to ensure the final exhaustion, ruin, and desolation of every province of Nature which he has reduced to his dominion.” The more civilised man has become, he tells us, the more he has destroyed. Purely untutored humanity interferes comparatively little with the arrangements of Nature, and the destructive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he advances in civilisation." In short, in his opinion, "better fifty years of Cathay than a cycle of Europe.

He took this gloomy view mainly on account of the mischief done by cutting down forests. Man has wrought this destruction not only with his own hand, but through domesticated animals more destructive than wild beasts, sheep, goats, horned cattle, stunting or killing the young shoots of trees. Writing of Tunisia, Mr. Perkins, the Principal of Roseworthy College, says: "In so far as young trees and shrubs are concerned, the passage of a flock of goats will do quite as much damage as a bush fire." Mr. Marsh seems to have met a fool in the forest, and it was man; and he found him to be more knave than fool, for man has been, in Mr. Marsh's view, the revolutionary Radical confiscating Nature's vested interests. "Man," he says, "has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste." Trees, to his mind, are Conservatives of the best kind. They stand in the way, it is true, but they stop excesses, they moderate the climate, they give shelter against the wind, they store the water, prevent inundations, preserve and enrich the soil. "The clearing of the woods," he says, "has in some cases produced within two or three generations effects as blasting as those generally ascribed to geological convulsions, and has laid waste the face of the earth more hopelessly than if it had been buried by a current of lava or a shower of volcanic sand"; and, once more, where forests have been destroyed, he says, "The face of the earth is no longer a sponge but a dust-heap."

The damage done by cutting down trees, and thereby letting loose torrents which wash away the soil, is or was very marked in the south of France, in Dauphiné, Provence, and the French Alps. With the felling of trees and the pasturing of sheep on the upper edge of the forest-for sheep break the soil and expose the roots the higher ground has been laid bare. Rainstorms have in consequence swept off the soil, and the floods have devastated the valleys. The mountainsides have become deserts, and the valleys have been turned into swamps. "When they destroyed the forest," wrote the great French geographer, Reclus,

about thirty years ago, "they also destroyed the very ground on which it stood"; and then he continues: "The devastating action of the streams in the French Alps is a very curious phenomenon from the historical point of view, for it explains why so many of the districts of Syria, Greece, Asia Minor, Africa, and Spain have been forsaken by their inhabitants. The men have disappeared along with the trees; the axe of the woodman, no less than the sword of the conqueror, has put an end to, or transplanted, entire populations." In the latter part of the South African war Sir William Willcocks, skilled in irrigation in Egypt, and now reclaiming Mesopotamia, was brought to South Africa to report upon the possibilities of irrigation there, and in his report dated November 1901 he wrote as follows: "Seeing in Basutoland the effect of about thirty years of cultivation and more or less intense habitation convinced me of the fact that another country with steep slopes and thin depth of soil, like Palestine, has been almost completely denuded by hundreds of years of cultivation and intense habits. The Palestine which Joshua conquered and which the children of Israel inhabited was in all probability covered over great part of its area by sufficient earth to provide food for a population a hundred times as dense as that which can be supported to-day." The Scotch geologist, Hugh Miller, again, attributed the formation of the Scotch mosses to the cutting down of timber by Roman soldiers. "What had been an overturned forest became in the course of years a deep morass.'

In past times there have been voices raised in favour of the forests, but they have been voices crying in the desert which man has made. Here is one. The old chronicler Holinshed, who lived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, noted the amount of timber cut down for house building and in order to increase the area for pasturage. "Every small occasion in my time," he writes, "is enough to cut down a great wood"; and in another passage either he himself or one of his collaborators writes that he would wish to live to see four things reformed in England: "The want of discipline in the Church, the covetous dealing of most of our merchants in the preferment of commodities of other countries and hindrance of their own, the holding of fairs and markets upon the Sunday to be abolished and referred to the Wednesdays, and that every man in whatever part of the champaine soil enjoyeth forty acres of land and upwards after that rate, either by free deed, copyhold or fee farm, might plant one acre of wood or sow the same with oke mast, hazell, beach, and sufficient provision be made that it be cherished and kept."

Mr. Marsh seems to have thought that the Old World, and especially the countries which formed the old Roman Empire, had been ruined almost past redemption; and for the beneficent action of man on Nature he looked across the seas. "Australia and New Zealand," he writes, are perhaps the countries from which we have a right to expect the fullest elucidation of these difficult and disputable problems. Here exist greater facilities and stronger motives for the careful study of the topics in question than have ever been found combined in any other theatre of European colonisation."

His book was first written half a century ago. He was a pessimist evidently, and pessimists exaggerate even more than optimists, for there is nothing more exhilarating and consoling to ourselves than to predict the worst possible consequences from our neighbour's folly. Further, though it may be true that man became more destructive as he became more civilised, it is also true that the destruction has been wrought directly rather by the unscientific than by the man of

science. If we have not grown less destructive since, at any rate we have shown some signs of penitence, and science has come to our aid in the work of reparation. Governments and associations have directed their attention to protecting woodland and reafforesting tracts which have been laid bare. The Touring Club of France, for instance, I am told, have taken up the question of the damage done by destruction of trees by men and sheep in Haute Savoie, and they assist reclamation by guidance and by grants. In England, under the auspices of Birmingham University and under the Presidency of Sir Oliver Lodge, the Midlands Reafforestation Association is planting the pit mounds and ash quarries of the Black Country with trees which will resist smoke and bad air, alders, willows, poplars, carrying out their work, a report says, under a combination of difficulties not to be found in any other country. Artificial lakes and reservoirs again, such as I shall refer to presently, are being made woodland centres. In most civilised countries nowadays living creatures are to some extent protected, tree planting is encouraged by Arbour days, and reserves are formed for forests, for beasts and birds, the survivors of the wild fauna of the earth. Some lands, such as Greece, as I gather from Mr. Perkins' report, are still being denuded of trees, but as a general rule the human conscience is becoming more and more alive to the immorality and the impolicy of wasting the surface of the earth and what lives upon it, and is even beginning to take stock as to whether the minerals beneath the surface are inexhaustible. Therefore I ask you now to consider man as the lord of creation in the nobler sense of the phrase as transforming geography, but more as a creative than as a destructive agency.

How far has the agency of man altered, and how far is it likely to alter, the surface of the earth, the divisions and boundaries assigned by Nature, the climate, and the production of the different parts of the globe; and, further, how far, when not actually transforming Nature, is human agency giving Nature the go-by? It should be borne in mind that science has effected, and is effecting transformation, partly by applying to old processes far more powerful machinery, partly by introducing new processes altogether; and that, as each new force is brought to light, lands and peoples are to a greater or less extent transformed. The world was laid out afresh by coal and steam. A new readjustment is taking place with the development of water power and oil power. Lands with no coal, but with fine water power or access to oil, are asserting themselves. Oil fuel is prolonging continuous voyages and making coaling stations superfluous. But of necessity it is the earth itself which gives the machinery for altering its surface. The application of the machinery is contributed by the wit of man.

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The surface of the earth consists of land and water. How far has human agency converted water into land or land into water, and how far, without actually transforming land into water and water into land, is it for practical human purposes altering the meaning of land and water as the great geographical divisions? A writer on the Fens and South Lincolnshire has told us: "The Romans, not content with appropriating land all over the world, added to their territory at home by draining lakes and reclaiming marshes." We can instance another great race which, while appropriating land all over the world, has added to it by reclaiming land from water, fresh or salt. The traveller from Great Britain to the most distant of the great British possessions, New Zealand, will find on landing at Wellington a fine street, Lambton Quay, the foreshore of the old beach, seaward of which now

rise many of the city's finest buildings on land reclaimed from the sea; and instances of the kind might be indefinitely multiplied. Now the amount of land taken from water by man has been taken more from fresh water than from sea, and, taken in all, the amount is infinitesimal as compared with the total area of land and water; but it has been very considerable in certain small areas of the earth's surface, and from these small areas have come races of men who have profoundly modified the geography and history of the world. This may be illustrated from the Netherlands and from Great Britain.

Motley, at the beginning of "The Dutch Republic," writes of the Netherlands: A region, outcast of ocean and earth, wrested at last from both domains their richest treasures." Napoleon was credited with saying that the Netherlands were a deposit of the Rhine, and the rightful property of him who controlled the sources; and an old writer pronounced that Holland was the gift of the ocean and of the rivers Rhine and Meuse, as Egypt is of the river Nile. The crowning vision of Goethe's Faust is that of a free people on a free soil, won from the sea and kept for human habitation by the daily effort of man. Such has been the story of the Netherlands. The Netherlands, as a home for civilised men, were, and are, the result of reclamation, of dykes and polders. The kingdom has a constantly changing area of between 12,000 and 13,000 square miles. Mr. Marsh, in his book, set down the total amount gained to agriculture at the time he wrote "by dyking out the sea and by draining shallow bays and lakes" at some 1370 square miles, which, he says, was one-tenth of the kingdom; at the same time, he estimated that much more had been lost to the sea-something like 2600 square miles. He writes that there were no important sea dykes before the thirteenth century, and that draining inland lakes did not begin until the fifteenth, when windmills came into use for pumping. In the nineteenth century steam pumps took the place of windmills, science strengthening an already existing process. Between 1815 and 1855, 172 square miles were reclaimed, and this included the Lake of Haarlem, some thirteen miles long by six in breadth, with an area of about seventythree square miles. This was reclaimed between 1840 and 183. At the present time, we are told, about forty square miles are being reclaimed annually in Holland; and meanwhile the Dutch Government has in contemplation or in hand a great scheme for draining the Zuyder Zee, which amounts to recovering from the ocean land which was taken by it in historic times at the end of the fourteenth century. The scheme is to be carried out in thirty-three years and is to cost nearly sixteen million pounds. The reclamation is to be effected by an embankment across the mouth of this inland sea over eighteen miles long. The result will be to add 815 square miles of land to the kingdom of the Netherlands, 750 square miles of which will be fertile land, and in addition to create a much-needed freshwater lake with an area of 557 square miles; this lake is to be fed by one of the mouths of the Rhine.

London is partly built on marsh. The part of London where I live, Pimlico, was largely built on piles. A little way north, in the centre of fashion, is Belgrave Square, and here a lady whom I used to know had heard her grandfather say that he had shot snipe. Take the City of London in the strict and narrow sense. The names of Moorfields and Fensbury or Finsbury are familiar to those who know the City. Stow, in his Survey of London, more than three hundred years ago, wrote of "The Moorfield which lieth without the postern called Moorgate. This field of old time was called the Moor. This fen or moor

field, stretching from the wall of the city betwixt Bishopsgate and the postern called Cripplegate to Fensbury and to Holywell continued a waste and unprofitable ground a long time." By 1527, he tells us, it was drained into the course of Walbrook, and so into the Thames, and by these degrees was this fen or moor at length made main and hard ground, which before, being overgrown with flags, sedges and rushes, served to no use." It is said that this fen or marsh had come into being since Roman times. The reclamation which has been carried out in the case of London is typical of what has been done in numerous other cases. As man has become more civilised, he has come down from his earlier home in the uplands, has drained the valley swamps, and on the firm land thus created has planted the streets and houses of great cities.

The Romans had a hand in the draining of Romney Marsh in Sussex, and here nature cooperated with man, just as she has cooperated in the deltas of the great rivers, for the present state of the old Cinque Ports, Rye and Winchelsea, shows how much on this section of the English coast the sea has receded. But the largest reclamation was in East Anglia, where the names of the Fens and the Isle of Ely testify to what the surface once was. "For some of our fens," writes Holinshed, are well known to be either of ten, twelve, sixteen, twenty or thirty miles in length. . . . Wherein also Elie, the famous isle, standeth, which is seven miles every way, and whereunto there is no access but by three causies." Arthur Young, in 1799, in his "General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lincoln," a copy of which he dedicated to that great friend of Australia, Sir Joseph Banks, who was a Lincolnshire landowner and a keen supporter of reclamation, wrote of the draining which had been carried out in Lincolnshire. "The quantity of land thus added to the kingdom has been great; fens of water, mud, wild fowl, frogs and agues have been converted to rich pasture and arable worth from 20s. to 40s. an acre . . . without going back to very remote periods, there cannot have been less than 150,000 acres drained and improved on an average from 5s. an acre to 25s." 150,000 acres is about 234 square miles, but the amount reclaimed by draining in Lincolnshire in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems to have been more than 500 square miles. The Fenlands as a whole extended into six counties. They were seventy miles in length, from ten to thirty miles broad, and covered an area of from 800 to 1000 square miles. One estimate I have seen is as high as 1200 square miles. Mr. Prothero, in his book on “English Farming. Past and Present," tells us that they were "in the seventeenth century a wilderness of bogs, pools and reed shoals-a vast morass from which here and there emerged a few islands of solid earth." In the seventeenth century a Dutch engineer, Vermuyden, was called in to advise, and the result of draining what was called after the peer who contracted for it the Bedford Level, together with subsequent reclamations, was to convert into ploughland and pasture large tracts which, in the words of an old writer, Dugdale, had been a vast and deep fen, affording little benefit to the realm other than fish or fowl, with overmuch harbour to a rude and almost barbarous sort of lazy and beggarly people." In Lincolnshire there was a district called Holland, and in Norfolk one called Marshland, said to have been drained by, to quote Dugdale again, "those active and industrious people, the Romans."

The Dutch and the English, who thus added to their home lands by reclamation, went far and wide through the world, changing its face as they went. The Dutch, where they planted themselves, planted trees also; and when they came to land like their own Netherlands, again they reclaimed and empoldered.

The foreshore of British Guiana, with its canals and sea defences, dating from Dutch times, is now the chief sugar-producing area in the British West Indies. If again in Australia man has been a geographical agency, he learnt his trade when he was changing the face of his old home in the British Isles.

Instances of reclaiming land from water might be indefinitely multiplied. We might compare the work done by different nations. In Norway, for instance, Reclus wrote that "the agriculturists are now reclaiming every year forty square miles of the marshes and fiords." Miss Semple, who, in the "Influences of Geographic Environment," writes that "between the Elbe and Scheldt" (that is, including with the Netherlands some of North Germany) more than 2000 square miles have been reclaimed from river and sea in the past 300 years," tells us also that "the most gigantic dyke system in the world is that of the Hoangho, by which a territory of the size of England is won from the water for cultivation." Or we might take the different objects which have impelled men here and there to dry up water and bank out sea. Agriculture has not been the only object, nor yet reclaiming for town sites. Thus, in order to work the hematite iron mines at Hodbarrow, in Cumberland, an area of 170 acres was, in the years 1900-04, reclaimed from the sea by a barrier more than 14 miles long, designed by the great firm of marine engineers, Coode and Matthews, which built the Colombo breakwater. The reclaimed land, owing to the subsidence caused by the workings, is now much below the level of the sea. Here is an instance of reclamation not adding to agricultural or pastoral area, but giving mineral wealth, thereby attracting population and enriching a district.

How far has land been drowned by the agency of man? Again the total area is a negligible quantity, but again, relatively to small areas, it has been appreciable, and the indirect effects have been great. The necessities of town life are responsible for new lakes and rivers. Such are the great reservoirs and aqueducts by which water is being brought to New York from the Catskill Mountains, a work which a writer in the Times has described as "hardly second in magnitude and importance to the Panama Canal." In Great Britain cities in search of a water supply have ordered houses, churches, fields to be drowned, and small lakes to come into existence. Liverpool created Lake Vyrnwy in Montgomeryshire, with a length of nearly five miles and an area of 1121 acres. Birmingham is the parent of a similar lake in a wild Radnorshire valley near my old home. The water is not carried for anything like the distance from Mundaring to Kalgoorlie, and on a much greater scale than these little lakes in Wales is the reservoir now being formed in New South Wales by the Burrinjuck dam, on the Murrumbidgee River, which, as I read, is, or will be, forty-one miles long, and cover an area of twenty square miles. If I understand right, in this case, by holding up the waters of a river, a long narrow lake has been or is being called into existence. A still larger volume of water is gathered by the great Assouan dam, which holds up the Nile at the head of the First Cataract, washing, and at times submerging, the old temples on the Island of Philæ in mid-stream. First completed in 1902, the dam was enlarged and heightened by 1912; and the result of the dam is at the time of high Nile to create a lake of some 65 square miles in area, as well as to fill up the channel of the river for many miles up stream. Illustrations of artificial lakes might be multiplied from irrigation works in India. An official report on the State of Hyderabad, written some years ago, has the following reference to the tanks in the granitic country of that State: "There are no natural lakes, but from the

earliest times advantage has been taken of the undulating character of the country to dam up some low ground or gorge between two hills, above which the drainage of a large area is collected. Such artificial reservoirs are peculiar to the granitic country, and wherever groups of granite hills occur tanks are sure to be found associated with them." Take again the great ship canals. The Suez Canal runs for 100 miles from sea to sea, though for part of its course it runs through water, not through sand. It is constantly growing in depth and width. Its original depth was 20 ft.; it is now, for nine-tenths of its length, more than 36 ft., and the canal is to be further deepened generally to more than 39 ft. Its original width at the bottom was 72 ft.; it is now, for most of its course, more than 147 ft.; in other words, the width has been more than doubled. A writer in the Times on the wonderful Panama Canal said: "The locks and the Gatun dam have entailed a far larger displacement of the earth's surface than has ever been attempted by the hand of man in so limited a space." Outside the locks the depth is 45 ft., and the minimum bottom width 300 ft. The official handbook of the Panama Canal says: "It is a lake canal as well as a lock canal, its dominating feature being Gatun Lake, a great body of water covering about 164 square miles." The canal is only fifty miles long from open sea to open sea, from shore line to shore line only forty. But in making it man, the geographical agency, has blocked the waters of a river, the Chagres, by building up a ridge which connects the two lines of hills between which the river flows, this ridge being a dam 14 miles long, nearly half a mile wide at its base, and rising to tog ft. above sea-level, with the result that a lake has come into existence which is three-quarters of the size of the Lake of Geneva, and extends beyond the limits of the Canal zone.

Mr. Marsh, in his book, referred to far more colossal schemes for turning land into water, such as flooding the African Sahara or cutting a canal from the Mediterranean to the Jordan and this submerging the basin of the Dead Sea, which is below the level of the ocean. The effect of the latter scheme, he estimated, would be to add from 2000 to 3000 square miles to the fluid surface of Syria. All that can be said is that the wildcat schemes of one century often become the domesticated possibilities of the next and the accomplished facts of the third; that the more discovery of new lands passes out of sight the more men's energies and imagination will be concentrated upon developing and altering what is in their keeping; and that, judging from the past, no unscientific man can safely set any limit whatever to the future achievements of science.

But now, given that the proportion of land to water and water to land has not been, and assuming that it will not be, appreciably altered, has water, for practical purposes, encroached on land, or land on water? In many cases water transport has encroached on land Transport. The great isthmus canals are an obvious instance; so are the great Canadian canals. The tonnage passing through the locks of the Sault St.-Marie is greater than that which is carried through the Suez Canal Waterways are made where there was dry land, and more often existing inland waterways are converted into soa going ways. Manchester has be come a soaport through its Ship Canal. The Clyde, in M: Ver son Harcourt words, writen in 1808, has been "converted from an insignificant stream into a con navigable river capable of ghing access to occan. keng tessels of large draught up to Glasgow." In 156 the Clyde at low water at Glasgow was onl x rebox dova, and unpl 1818 »o sotgoing reser's ca se de to Glasg 1a 180g the depth at low water was soft, and steamers win a may, a * N of ng tot ge un to Glasgen.

the result of dredging, deepening and widening the river, and increasing the tidal flow. The record of the Tyne has been similar. The effect of dredging the Tyne was that in 1895-I quote Mr. Harcourt again"Between Shields and Newcastle, where formerly steamers of only 3 to 4 ft. draught used to ground for hours, there is now a depth of 20 ft. throughout at the lowest tides." It is because engineers have artificially improved Nature's work on the Clyde and the Tyne that these rivers have become homes of shipbuilding for the whole world. Building training walls on the Seine placed Rouen, seventy-eight miles up the river, high among the seaports of France. The Elbe and the Rhine, the giant rivers Mississippi and St. Lawrence, and many other rivers, have, as know, been wonderfully transformed by the hand of the engineer.

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But land in turn, in this matter of transport, has encroached upon sea. In old days, when roads were few and bad, when there were no railways, and when ships were small, it was all-important to bring goods by water at all parts as far inland as possible. In England there were numerous flourishing little ports in all the estuaries and up the rivers, which, under modern conditions, have decayed. No one now thinks of Canterbury and Winchester in connection with seaborne traffic; but Mr. Belloc, in "The Old Road," a description of the historical Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury, points out how these two oldworld cathedral cities took their origin and derived their importance from the fact that each of them, Canterbury in particular, was within easy reach of the coast, where a crossing from France would be made; each on a river-in the case of Canterbury on the Stour just above the end of the tideway. In the days when the Island of Thanet was really an island, separated | from the rest of Kent by an arm of the sea, and when the present insignificant river Stour was, in the words of the historian J. R. Green, "a wide and navigable estuary," Canterbury was a focus to which the merchandise of six Kentish seaports was brought, to pass on inland; it was in effect practically a seaport. Now merchandise, except purely local traffic, comes to a few large ports only, and is carried direct by rail to great distant inland centres. Reclus wrote that bays are constantly losing in comparative importance as the inland ways of rapid communication increase; that, in all countries intersected with railways, indentations in the coast-line have become rather an obstacle than an advantage; and that maritime commerce tends more and more to take for its starting-place ports situated at the end of a peninsula. He argues, in short, that traffic goes on land as far out to sea as possible instead of being brought by water as far inland as possible. He clearly overstated the case, but my contention is that, for human purposes, the coast-line, though the same on the mar, has practically been altered by human agency. Ports have been brought to men as much as men to ports. We see before our eyes the process going on of bridging India to Ceylon so as to carry goods and passengers as far by land as possible, and in Ceylon we see the great natural harbour of Trincomalee practically deserted and a wonderful artificial harbour created at the centre of population, Colombo.

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But let us carry the argument a Ettle further. Great Britain is an island. Unless there is some great convulsion of Nature, to a time the Straits of Dover will separate it from the continent of Europe. Yet we have at this moment & renewal of the scheme for a Channel tannel, and at this moment men are flying from Fegland to France and France to England. Suppose the Channel tunnel to be made; suppose flying to be intproved and it is improving every day-what will Awne of the Kland? 11Set w become of the sea?