No. 4.] LOVE AND STUDY OF NATURE. 149 



is an amorphous relic of pre-scientific days in education, the 

 text-book maker's pet and the true pedagogue's abomination. 

 If we could reduce it to a fourth or a tenth of its present 

 time and dimensions, and substitute the rudiments of the 

 leading sciences of which it is a kind of hash, resembling- 

 life only as an unlinked sausage resembles an organic and 

 living snake, the efficiency of our entire school system would 

 be greatly enhanced. Such a change can of course come only 

 slowly; strongholds of prejudice rarely capitulate at once, 

 but are gradually worn away by the fresh currents of thought 

 and knowledge that are now acquiring more and more mo- 

 mentum. Compare the scope of a full-blown modern geog- 

 raphy, with all its canvas of maps, its photographs of cereals, 

 mines, cars, tables of population, animals, geological scenes, 

 barbaric costumes, fishing and hunting, fine public buildings, 

 ships, huts, savage wagons, sculptured heads, savage cus- 

 toms, happy families of beasts, birds and insects, extracts 

 from census maps, and with chips from, as I estimate it, 

 about seven to ten different sciences, with the modest field 

 of work laid down by the professors of geography in the 

 few foreign universities that enjoy that admirable luxury, 

 or the field which the Royal Geographical Society proposes 

 to itself, and we shall realize what a fungoid, nondescript 

 and amorphous parasite threatens the health and well-being 

 of our school system. 



As Turkey is sometimes called the sick man of Europe, 

 so geography is the sick subject of our curriculum, and 

 needs doctoring. Turkey is a bit of Asia and Africa which 

 erupted into another continent. It represents a faith once so 

 strong as to threaten to overrun the West, but is now the 

 reduced relic of medievalism. Just so geography in its old 

 form, cosmology, included almost the entire field now occu- 

 pied by the sciences that deal with nature. Its frequent 

 definition, — a description of the earth — including, of 

 course, the air above and the mines beneath, and not lim- 

 ited to a mathematical surface, includes almost everything 

 that can ever be of interest to man. The special sciences 

 have split off from it somewhat, as the different humanistic 

 branches have gradually split off from philosophy or geology 

 yet earlier. Again, our text-books in geography in recent 



