The popular Physical meaning is better conveyed by the word physiography, a geography.
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.
In still more western fields of research much additional light has been thrown since 1875 on the physiography of the great deserts and oases of Arabia.
Lyons' The Physiography of the River Nile and its Basin (Cairo, 1906), and the authorities quoted in those works.
The Hindu Kush is, in fact, but the face of a great upheaved mass of plateau-land lying beyond it northwards, just as the Himalaya forms the southern face of the great central tableland of Tibet, and its general physiography, exhibiting long, narrow, lateral valleys and transverse lines of "antecedent" drainage, is XIII.