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The geography of the not far distant past has 

 been ahnost wholly descriptive. It has consisted of 

 mechanical definitions of land forms and bodies of 

 water which gave but little idea of the forms defined 

 and none of their origin. 



Countries and states were bounded, their capitals 

 and principal towns named and located, and their 

 products enumerated. A volcano was a "burning 

 mountain;" and rivers rose in lakes and "emptied" 

 into the sea. We did not learn why the volcano ejects 

 lava and broken fragments of rock, which are wrongly 

 called "ashes," or that it does not really "burn;" nor 

 why the Deleware, Susquehanna, and the Potomac 

 rivers cross the Allegheny ridges and the Blue Ridge to 

 reach the Atlantic, while New River crosses both the 

 Alleghany and the Blue Ridge in the opposite direction 

 to reach the Ohio. 



We learned that Albany, Trenton, Richmond, 

 Raleigh, Columbia, and Atlanta were state capitals ; 

 but their relations to tide-water, coastal plain, and 

 interior basin were left for more recent times to dis- 

 cover. In this way one continent after another was 

 studied, and the artificial stereotyped classification 

 applied to all. Fortunately for the pupils of the 

 present day, the old method is a thing of the past, and 

 a rational method has come to take its place. To 

 two fundamental ideas is due the welcome change. 

 The law of cause and effect has no\v come to be recog- 

 nized as the guiding principle in geograph3' as the 

 other sciences, and under the name of "the causal 

 notion in geography" has come to dominate our 

 modern teaching. 



The second notion is that of ''the type form," by 

 which the features of the earth's surface are described 

 with relation to the forces which operated to produce 

 them and to give to each the characteristic structure 

 and form which the great physiographic processes 

 everywhere bring forth. 



