8i8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



development within the comprehension of children. It is not 

 hard to conceive a country of hills and valleys as a surface partly 

 worn toward a goal of lowland denudation, and then to find in 

 the forms visible from the schoolhouse window ever-varying 

 episodes in this history. It is not to be understood that this 

 larger conception will be put upon the pupil at the outset ; he will 

 rather proceed from the minor passages of the land history to its 

 main and grand movement. The brook, gravel bank, ravine, and 

 hillock willlead to a mental picture of the township, county, 

 State, and continent. And it is not to be forgotten that the ani- 

 mals and plants, clouds and storms, climate and productions, 

 highways, cities, and all other material of geography will have 

 their place in the teaching ; it is only held that they will gather 

 new meaning as they take their places in a comprehensive scheme 

 of geographic development. It is of small account that the new 

 teaching has what may be called a geologic aspect ; names mat- 

 ter little when the only rational knowledge of geography is con- 

 cerned. 



Prof. W. B. Powell has given in the National Geographic 

 Magazine an elaborate outline of the progress in the public 

 schools of Washington toward such a rational understanding of 

 the geography of the United States, beginning with the particu- 

 lar and working toward the general, in the field and by labora- 

 tory methods, as with specimens, maps, drawing, and sand model- 

 ing. The fullest pedagogical statement of the meaning and needs 

 of the new geography for schools below college grade is contained 

 in the Conference report on geography, to which reference has 

 been made. The names appended to it stamp it as a representa- 

 tive utterance, and it is enough here to refer the interested reader 

 to the document itself, only citing the final paragraph of the dis- 

 cussion of it by President Eliot's committee : " They (the Confer- 

 ence) recommend a study of physical geography, which would 

 embrace in its scope the elements of half a dozen natural sciences 

 and would bind together in one sheaf the various gleanings 

 which the pupils would have gathered from widely separated 

 fields. There can be no doubt that the study would be interest- 

 ing, informing, and developing, or that it would be difficult and 

 in every way substantial." 



Geography is winning its way to a place in the college and 

 the university. Objection has been raised for the reason tersely 

 stated by some one that the subject is "a graphy and not a logy." 

 But we have seen that the new geography is not only a descrip- 

 tive and distributive body of truth; it is historical and causal. 

 The older geography has allied itself, so far as it has had place in 

 the university, chiefly with history. The new geography offers a 

 yet larger contribution to history, but will ally itself more closely 



