Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings - Praxis (e)Press

2What Geography Ought to Be 1Peter Kropotkin1885. The Nineteenth Century 18, 940-56. 2It was easy to foresee that the great revival of Natural Science which ourgeneration has had the happiness to witness for thirty years, as also the new directiongiven to scientific literature by a phalanx of prominent men who dared to bring up theresults of the most complicated scientific research in a shape accessible to the generalreader, would necessarily bring about a like revival of Geography. This science, whichtakes up the laws discovered by its sister sciences, and shows their mutual action andconsequences with regard to the superficies of the globe, could not remain an outsiderto the general scientific movement; and we see now an interest awakened inGeography which very much recalls the general interest taken in it by a proceedinggeneration during the first half of our century. We have not had among us so gifted atraveller and philosopher as Humboldt was; but the recent Arctic voyages and deep-seaexplorations, and still more the sudden progress accomplished in Biology,Climatology, Anthropology, and Comparative Ethnography, have given togeographical works so great an attraction and so deep a meaning that the methodsthemselves of describing the earthball have undergone of late a deep modification. Thesame high standard of scientific reasoning and philosophical generalisations whichHumboldt and Ritter had accustomed us to, reappear again in geographical literature.No wonder, therefore, if works both of travel and of general geographical descriptionare becoming again the most popular kind of reading.1 Keltie, J. Scott. 1985. Geographical Education. Report to the council of the RoyalGeographical Society. London.2 Text downloaded from anarchy archives, http://anarchyarchives.org (abridged version), withpermission from Dana Ward.11