150 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



decades, as an inspection shows, are mostly written by men 

 who would not be recognized as members of any geograph- 

 ical society, and many of whom lack a collegiate education. 

 The same is true of a number of those who are most promi- 

 nent representatives or advocates of its methods. So that the 

 doctors of our sick men are not recognized by the general 

 school. In his comprehensive memoir upon the subject, Mr. 

 Scott Keltie, among two hundred and twenty-nine text- 

 books in geography, mentions only three American ones. 

 Geography, while it has had able representatives in special 

 departments of it in this country, is the favorite tumbling 

 ground for the half-educated or uneducated, and has never 

 felt those stimulating influences that are always working 

 from the university departments downward, but has been 

 left almost entirely to be shaped by the school-master and 

 the publisher. It has nearly all the defects of popularized 

 science, without the saving merits of the latter, — of having 

 been made by experts. 



I would by no means advocate the entire abolition of geog- 

 raphy from the school courses, but I would not only greatly 

 reduce the text-books and time, but put the work much 

 later, and teach most of the matter now included in it in the 

 high school, in proper scientific connection, — part of it with 

 history, part with astronomy, part with geology, part with 

 natural history, etc., — the elements of all of these to be thus 

 made room for at the expense of their common enemy. 

 This in a way would respect and not actually injure the unity 

 of the child's mind. I do not expect these changes to be 

 sudden. The methods and text-books of teaching nature 

 which I would substitute are not yet sufficiently perfected, 

 but we do now know, from the study of the child's mind and 

 the order of the development of both its interests and its 

 powers, that all these are disregarded and sometimes out- 

 raged by the modern American school geographies. I hope 

 the time will come when, in the new university developments 

 impending, we can have enough professors of geography 

 among them all, by the methods of the division of labor, 

 the essential departments properly included under this 

 name, and this will help to reduce the hypertrophy and 

 congestion and chaos from which the schools are now suffer- 



