Notes On Publication
This is the 34th (revised) edition 578pp, probably 1905.
First edition was 1889.
From:
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/faculty/westbury/paradigm/graves6.html
Paradigm, No. 19 (May, 1996)
The intellectual origins of
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British geography textbooks
Norman Graves
Institute of Education,
University of London,
20 Bedford Way,
London WC1H 0AL
..
A substantial book, which in 1892 was in its 6th edition, was Meiklejohn's A New Geography On The Comparative Method, which ran to 554 pages of relatively small print. It covers what we might now call thematic or systematic geography in 50 pages and then covers the world country by country in the following 500 or so pages. The author states:
The book contains all that is necessary for the Examinations of Pupil Teachers and Students at Training Colleges; and also for candidates for the Oxford and Cambridge Local Examinations . . .33
Thus in this case the readership is explicitly stated. By the standard of its time, it is a relatively attractive book, having a large number of clear uncluttered maps and diagrams, and using different types and size of print to emphasize particular facts or names (see Figures 5a and 5b). But the bulk of the book is essentially descriptive and factual. Even in the section devoted to systematic geography, there little that could be called explanation, except in that part which concerns the atmosphere, but this is limited. There is more concern with defining and classifying than with explaining.
In general books of this period tend to be descriptive and factual and, apart from elementary explanations of climate and the seasons, the only idea which seems to be adopted by some of the books is that there is a deterministic relationship between position, climate, relief and geology, and the life and destiny of people in an area. Comparisons with Britain are, more often than not, favourable to Britain and its empire. There is also a tendency to pronounce on the character of national groups. For example Meiklejohn states of the French:
The Frenchman is said to be light and frivolous, but in most cases he is a very serious person, brave, when he is succeeding but too easily depressed; very clever with his hands, and generally amiable, polite and urbane. Intellectually, the Frenchman is famous for lucidity of thought . . .
These character-sketches seem either to come from the author's imagination or they are quotations from travel books he has consulted.
The origins of the deterministic streak in these textbooks are difficult to trace, since they do not acknowledge their sources. Darwin's Origins of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859, could be said to have influenced these textbook writers, just as it was said to have influenced Ratzel in Germany and subsequently Semple and Huntington in the USA, all of whom wrote books in which environmental determinism was a powerful motif, though Wanklyn argues that Ratzel's views were not so simply stated.34 But these geographers published works either during the last quarter of the 19th century or in the early-20th century; it is doubtful that Geikie, for example, could have read Ratzel, though he was obviously aware of Darwin's theories. Certainly these textbook authors could not have read Huntington or Semple whose works were not published until 1907 and 1911 respectively. I am much more inclined to believe that the idea that people's lives were closely affected by their physical environment gradually became an attractive theory to which the work of Darwin could be said to lend some support, and that this could give some academic respectability to a subject that seemed to many to be devoid of any intellectual rigour. Indeed Richard Peet argues that
Environmental determinism was geography's entry into modem science. Determinism attempted to explain the imperial events of late 19th and early 20th century capitalism in a scientific way.35