Why?
Because to improve the race by way of eugenics, though doubtless feasible within limits, remains an unrealized possibility through our want of knowledge.

On the other hand, to improve the physical environment is fairly straight-ahead work, once we can awake the public conscience to the need of undertaking this task for the benefit of all classes of the community alike.

If civilized man wishes to boast of being clearly superior to the rest of his kind, it must be mainly in respect to his control over the physical environment.

Whatever may have been the case in the past, it seems as true now-a-days to say that man makes his physical environment as that his physical environment makes him.
Even if this be granted, however, it remains the fact that our material circumstances in the widest sense of the term play a very decisive part in the shaping of our lives.

Hence the importance of geographical studies as they bear on the subject of man.