Excerpt from Geographical Studies Professor Carl Ritter of Berlin
But a large part of the generalizations of this book are not as yet worked out: they may appear loose and vague and unmeaning; and yet they had to their author, conversant as he was with the myriads of geographical details, a distinctness of meaning which hardly any one can see who has not read the twenty thousand pages of Ritter's Erdkunde.
Mr. Buckle has elaborated, in one of the opening chapters of the History of Civilization in England, two or three of Ritter's thoughts, and has applied them briefly to a few countries; and while he goes to an extent to which Ritter was ever a stranger, abusing the thought instead of using it, that nations as well as individuals are modified by their geographical conditions, yet his chapter shows how wide a field of application lies still open to the generalizations of the great geographer. Ritter nowhere makes man subject, in silent, unresisting dumbness, to the influences of nature; he allows for results which issue from the mutual conflict of geographical conditions and the freedom of man's will; but Buckle, going far beyond Ritter, makes the former element all, and reduces the latter to a cipher.
The Introduction to the Erdkunde, and the General Observations on the Fixed Forms of the Earth's Surface, are the only portions of Ritter's great work, of any length, which could be incorporated into this translation.
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