1865–1915 · Scottish geographer and Oxford’s first Professor of Geography
Born in Galashiels and trained partly at the meteorological observatory on Ben Nevis, Herbertson came to Oxford as a reader in geography in 1899 and became the university’s first Professor of Geography in 1905, heading its geography department from 1910. Academically he is remembered for his scheme of the world’s natural regions, but his widest reach came through school textbooks like Outlines of Physiography, written to explain the physical world plainly to children. He died of a heart attack in Buckinghamshire in 1915, almost certainly never knowing that one clause from Chapter XII would outlast everything else he wrote.