SECTION E.— GEOGRAPHY. 



ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY IN MODERN 



EDUCATION. 



ADDRESS BY 



PROF. JOHN L. MYRES, O.B.E., F.B.A., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



When the Geographical Association met at Oxford last spring it was 

 welcomed, by one who knows the University well and has served it long, 

 with a retrospect of geographical studies there, of which the theme was 

 this : that geography, though in its modern guise it ranked among those 

 ' new subjects ' which an ancient institution was expected to tolerate, if 

 not to embrace, was nevertheless of old standing there, and good repute ; 

 and that, while other branches of nineteenth-century science had estab- 

 lished themselves in almost aggressive self-sufficiency, as additions — some 

 might say accretions — to academic structure, geography had expressed 

 itself rather in a modification of the whole point of view from which 

 traditional studies were surveyed, and on which humanistic education was 

 based. 



Without any disparagement of the systematic training offered to 

 those who desire it by the Oxford School of Geography, or of the con- 

 spicuous services of its first two directors. Sir Halford Mackinder and the 

 late Dr. Herbertson, to geographical teaching in general, it may be claimed, 

 I think, that this estimate of the place won for geography in a great 

 university is of more than local significance. In the British Association 

 (we do well to remember) geography, though not quite one of our original 

 sections (as was the history of science), shared Section C with geology 

 from 1835 to 1851 ; it was a great geologist. Sir Roderick Murchison, who 

 advocatec^ a separate geographical section, and became the first president 

 of Section E ; and it was in the friendly shelter of Section E that 

 anthropological studies took shape in the next generation, till they 

 matured into Section H in 1884. And such co-partnership is in accord 

 with the profession of geographers themselves, that their subject is the 

 coherent application of the methods and conclusions of other sciences, 

 within regional limits, and- — to be quite precise — within certain chrono- 

 logical boundaries also. 



It is this claim for geography that it co-ordinates regionally the results 

 and conclusions of other sciences in respect to the natural phenomena of 

 each and every region, and that, including as it must Man's activities 

 among the factors with which it is concerned, it stands in a peculiarly 

 intimate relation with history, that brings it under the special notice of 

 the art and applied science of education, but at the same time has made 

 it so difficult in practice to assign to geographers their proper place and 



H 



