148 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



intelligence, interest and power of comprehension. I cannot 

 forbear, however, to say that geography, as now taught and 

 administered in our school text-books, illustrates the climax 

 of all this confusion. To have begun with the world of 

 Homer and a few primitive maps ; to have widened to the 

 universe of Dante, as pictured in Rosetti's charming intro- 

 duction ; with some account of the labor of soul that led to 

 the epoch of discovery introduced by Columbus ; the warfare 

 of science and religion in the days of Gallileo ; selected 

 themes from anthropology ; something about sacred moun- 

 tains ; the great mediaeval highways ; accounts of surveys, — 

 would have been better, as would even the method that 

 begins with the school-room, yard, street and town, than the 

 modern limbo of boundaries, capitals, mud maps, a farrago 

 of scraps of astronomy, zoology, mining, agriculture, polit- 

 ical divisions, botany, geology, races of men, history, etc., 

 which make modern school geography the most anti-scientific 

 unpedagogical of all school topics. These subjects have 

 little or no very obvious connection with each other, from 

 the stand-point of nascent periods, some belong earlier and 

 some later, and the whole could come anywhere or nowhere. 

 Most of it has to be memorized with the items in arbitrary 

 connection, and it is a kind of gehenna or place of skulls in 

 the economy of scientific housekeeping. It is the science of 

 the poor in spirit and the feeble in heart. Those who go on 

 through college have the work all over in different and more 

 logical connections, so that, if it were justified, nothing 

 would better illustrate the falsity of the now oft-quoted but 

 misleading principle, that the same studies should have the 

 same manner of approach, whether education ends with the 

 minimum of legal requirements in the grammar school or 

 proceeds to a degree. I once took a prize in school for 

 bounding every State in the Union ; but now, although I 

 have visited most of them, I probably could not accurately 

 bound a quarter of them, and nevertheless I manage to lead 

 a life not particularly handicapped by intellectual penury, 

 which is regarded by my friends as, on the whole, that of 

 one who might pass for an educated man. 



Geography is the great obstacle to-day in the way of 

 placing the study of nature on a sound pedagogic basis. It 



