l as our heads. We must be artists as well as meticulous
classifiers, cataloguers, and reasoners. The Earth is a living being, a
throbbing, palpitating, living being--"live" enough to have given
birth to the remote ancestors of mankind, and live enough, so some
biologists consider, to be continually to this day generating the
lowliest forms of organisms. To know and understand a living being,
particularly when that living being happens to be his own Mother,
man must use his heart as well as his head.

With his head alone the geographer may do a vast amount of most
useful and necessary work which will help us to understand the
Earth. He may collect and classify facts about her and record
measurements, and reason about these facts and measurements, but
if he is to get the deepest vision of the Earth and learn the
profoundest truth about her he must exercise his finest spiritual
senses as well. And when he brings those faculties of the soul into
play, it will be the Beauty on the face of Mother-Earth that he will
see and that will disclose to him her real nature.

And therefore I hold that if it be the function of Geography to know
the Earth and to describe the Earth, then the objection that the
description of its Natural Beauty is outside the scope of Geography
is not a valid objection. The picture and the poem are as legitimate a
part of Geography as the map.

Some years ago in lecturing to the Royal Geographical Society I
said that the Society ought to have given Wordsworth the Gold
Medal. I meant that the poet by his vision had taught us more about
the Lake District than any ordinary geographer had been able to see.
With his finer sensibility he had been able to see deeper. He had
been able to reveal to us truths about the district which no mere
ordnance surveyor was able to disclose. He was a true discoverer--a
geographical discoverer--a geographer of the highest type. He had
helped us really to know and understand the district.

Be it noted, too, that he did not, as some would think, put into the
lakes and hills and valleys something from within himself which
was not really in those natural features. The particular beauty that he
saw there was there waiting to be revealed. The natural features
aroused emotions in his sensitive soul, and his soul being aroused
saw the beauty in them. If the district had been of billiard-table
flatness, with no lakes, no hills, no valleys, then even he, with all his
poetic feeling