E.— GEOGRAPHY. 113 



actually employed. More than fifteen years ago I had occasion to note 

 {Geographical Journal, October 1912, p. 358) that certain omissions in the 

 list of work submitted to the research department of the Royal 

 Geographical Society ' would probably have been avoided if the study 

 of geography in the older universities had been more closely associated 

 with the historical -studies which figure so largely there,' and that 'the 

 present divorce is probably inevitable so long as the study of historical 

 and literary subjects is regulated so closely, as it seems to be, by the 

 requirements of the Civil Service examination ; and as long as those 

 examinations assign to geography the quite unworthy place to which it 

 is restricted now.' Since the year 1912 there has indeed been improve- 

 ment in detail, but no serious reconsideration of policy. If I may judge 

 from experience both of examinations in history and in geography, and 

 of informal conference with teachers and taught, what passes for 

 ' historical geography ' is still one of the weaker aspects of the geographical 

 course, while what has been described as ' geographical history ' is hardly 

 attempted at all. Questions, rarely set, are still more rarely answered. 

 Every examiner, and most teachers, know quite well what that means. 

 What a piece of window-dressing is the familiar rubric that ' sketch-maps 

 should be added where possible ' ! "What flights of imagination occur, 

 what skeletons emerge from their cupboards, when such sketch-maps are 

 ' attempted ' ! 



In discussions of elementary training we hear a good deal of the 

 co-ordination of brain, eye, and hand. Why is it that as we ascend our 

 educational ladder this primary necessity seems to be progressively 

 ignored in the study of the humanities ? With every allowance for the 

 disciplinary value of games — often so highly ' organised ' that their value 

 as play or even as recreation begins to be doubtful, and some of us wonder 

 why they are not frankly included in the time-table as ' alternatives ' to 

 music, carpentering, and natural history — such lack of manual dexterity 

 as I have described is a serious defect of scholarly equipment. It is only 

 not realised as such, because the chief employers of the ' finished ' output 

 of the humanistic courses in our universities are still themselves so 

 inexperienced in graphic methods that many of them would have some 

 difficulty in understanding a fully illustrated report on any regional 

 topic. Statistics in tabular form have a certain impressiveness, and 

 persons of vivid imagination claim the ' gift of tongues ' in interpreting 

 them ; but what would happen to a speaker in Parliament who illustrated 

 his argument with a map ? 



Yet in every other aspect of learning and advanced study, competent 

 use of its special symbols and notation is an elementary prerequisite. A 

 Grecian who boggled over and O, a mathematician who misused a 

 bracket or misread a decimal point, a chemist who confused Mn and Mg, 

 a botanist who failed to draw recognisably the structures composing a 

 flower, would, I think, have short shrift. But it is amazing how ill- 

 equipped are most students of literary or historical subjects when it is 

 a question of describing anything otherwise than in grammatical long- 

 hand. It is not merely that they are poor draughtsmen ; it is rather that 

 they do not do their thinking about regional matters in such fashion that 

 geographical symbols can express it. Rome, Athens, Paris, Vienna, York 

 are to them abstractions such as Mn and Mg might be to a bookworm 



1928 I 



