Her fascination with the surface of the earth led her to study physical geography.
The actual and past distribution of plants must obviously be controlled by the facts of physical geography.
It is true that the earths physical geography presents certain broad features to which plants are adapted.
The treatises on physical geography by Mrs Mary Somerville and Sir John Herschel (the lattewritten for the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) showed the effect produced in Great Britain by the stimulus of Humboldt's work.
During the rapid development of physical geography many branches of the study of nature, which had been included in the cosmography of the early writers, the physiography of Linnaeus and even the Erdkunde of Ritter, had been as so much advanced by the labours of specialists that their connexion was apt to be forgotten.
