360 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



Europe, half a dozen on Asia, four on Africa and one on 

 North and South America. And yet the French complain 

 that we are not sufficiently interested in France 1 



Illinois offers both distinct advantages and disadvant- 

 ages as an area for special study. The modern idea is 

 that an intense study of a very restricted area has dis- 

 tinct advantages over the cursory study of a great area. 

 Professor Jones, of Chicago, says that now that he has 

 attempted to study Patagonia and extensive sections of 

 Southern Asia he is going to study Chicago and vicinity 

 next. For such intense study a State may be too large, 

 but for the undergraduate, in less intense work, where 

 the desired results are more general, a state may not be 

 too large. Professor Ridgley says ; "A geographical unit 

 should be large enough to permit the development of the 

 main lines of geographic thought; it should be small 

 enough to be comprehended with accuracy and vividness 

 in its statistical facts ; it should be sufficiently diverse in 

 physical and climatic conditions to lead to interesting 

 contrasts." Illinois is all this. . 



At the Ann Arbor Meeting of the National Council of 

 Geography Teachers, Professor Branom of St. Louis 

 presented an excellent paper on State Geography with 

 special reference to Missouri, but with many general ap- 

 plications and suggestions that have helped me in plan- 

 ning this Course. For organization and method I drew 

 extensively from a Graduate Course on "Geography of 

 Michigan" that I took at the University of Michigan. 

 It is one thing to name the materials that could be used 

 in such a course and an entirely different thing to list the 

 materials that were used and worth using again. A text, 

 "The Geography of Illinois", was in the hands of each 

 student, and this book by Ridgley played an important 

 part especially when you take into account the fact that 

 most of our students seem to know little about formal 

 lecture work and are still considerably impressed with 

 ' ' the Book ' '. The statistical work was based principally 

 on the publications of the Fourteenth Census, especially 

 those bulletins dealing with Illinois population and agri- 

 culture. State Geological Survey Bulletins, especially 

 Numbers 15 and 27, were used; also a great variety of 



