E.— GEOGRAPHY. 107 



vegetation — we remember the cynic's definition of weeds as ' God's plants 

 growing where man doesn't want them '— ; all engineering, displacement 

 and replacement of the solid earth or its ingredients ; all commerce, 

 redistribution of natural resources or our rehandlings of them. At every 

 stage, and more insistently and obviously in each higher stage, we are 

 called upon to ' think geographically ' ; and most of all when we come 

 to the consideration of man's dealings with his finest tool and worst 

 obstacle, his fellow-men. To take an instance from current political 

 discussion : what do we mean by a ' congested district,' and how do we 

 propose to deal with the population of a coalfield where there is no more 

 coal ? It is a question, once again, of redistribution, and it arises from 

 a fact of redistribution in the past ; for the coal has gone somewhere. 



Thirdly, then, it is our business to train inborn faculties of observation 

 and inference to make their own analysis of actual regional circumstances, 

 and to present these as the momentary current phase of many interacting 

 processes, such as the special sciences are concerned to interpret severally, 

 under the limitations of the relatively stable structure of the given portion 

 of the earth's surface to which the citizen-to-be has access now ; and 

 maybe he will never have the chance to deal with any other. Modern 

 geography accordingly adopts increasingly, and almost inevitably, this 

 regional method of study and exposition as being at the same time the 

 most efficient and the most economical in point of time. It is a method 

 which presents close analogies with the use of ' set books ' in the teaching 

 of languages. There a brief analytical study of the elements of grammar 

 leads directly to the exploration— for to the pupil it is nothing less— of 

 the ' fine confused feeding ' of grammatical constructions as they flowed 

 from the pen of Ceesar or Xenophon. In the teaching of history it is the 

 same. The general equipment of needs, motives and aspirations which 

 actuate ordinary people is presumed to be familiar, and a beginning is 

 made at once on episodes and periods which exhibit such people working 

 out their life-history among the resources and restrictions of a homeland, 

 which is in the first instance that of the pupils themselves. 



Ancient Geography of the Homeland. 



Yet even at that elementary stage in which the common aim of all 

 concurrent ' courses ' of instruction is to make the child familiar with 

 the leading features of the ' homeland,' historical retrospect comes to 

 play a part of ever-increasing importance ; if only because in our time 

 those very features are being profoundly modified. Artificial, and for 

 the most part urban or suburban conditions, are rapidly encroaching on 

 what was recently rural. Habitual access to unspoiled countryside, and 

 familiarity with country life, become more precarious and diflicult, and 

 most of all for small children. Yet what we call ' unspoiled countryside ' 

 in most parts of this island is itself in great measure artificial ; the result 

 not so much of the centuries of almost unimproved farming, as of those 

 two past crises — as revolutionary in their effects on the ' countryside ' as 

 anything that followed until the last hundred years— the Saxon Conquest 

 with its intense exploitation of the forested lowlands ; and, before that, 

 the coming of any kind of agriculture at all, restricted though this earlier 



