114 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



who ' read chemistry ' in an encyclopaedia, but never handled a test tube. 

 And this raises a doubt whether that appearance, and even parade, of 

 accuracy in other parts of their work, in chronology or the technique of 

 archive-hunting, necessarily presumes that insight into historical processes 

 which it is often supposed to imply. So too, at the other extreme, there 

 have been both surveyors and big-game hunters who did not do much 

 for geography. Yet, considered merely as a test of those qualities of 

 co-ordinated craftsmanship, accurate observation, and clear concise state- 

 ment of relevant facts, map-making ranks high. As I have had occasion 

 to say elsewhere, ' a finished map is a scientific document, but it is also 

 a work of art ; to its scientific value, its completeness and accuracy, it 

 adds the value which is given by style, the grace, which in a map, as in 

 speech or writing, or any art of expression, is perhaps best rendered by its 

 old Latin name of eloqiientia ; for it is the grace of speaking out. A map, 

 no less than a despatch or a poem, has to give a message, without parade, 

 or digression, or confusion ; in the fewest and most unmistakeable symbols, 

 which have the merits, and also the defects, of all symbols, and are good 

 servants only in trained and sure hands. And what is true of a map, 

 the geographical document in its simplest and most purely geographical 

 form, is just as true of other geographical work, which is all a more or 

 less explicit commentary on maps, in literary form, or hints for the com- 

 parison of maps with one another. All work of this kind is a work of art ; 

 the geographer puts scientific material into it ; but he puts something 

 of himself into it as well ; it is (as we say) his work ; and we are right, 

 I think, in taking into account, as geographers, the form into which 

 he casts it, the geographical style which is his.' {Geographical Journal, 

 October 1912, p. 363.) 



This is one reason why I have concentrated my advocacy of a more 

 liberal acknowledgment of the geographical aspect of all historical 

 studies, on the special instance of ancient geography ; for it is in those 

 compartments of our educational system where ancient history holds the 

 most honoured and responsible place, that indifference to geographical 

 considerations has lasted longest and most generally. And so long as a 

 numerous and influential class of public servants and legislators is recruited 

 from those compartments, so long will the geographical aspect of historical 

 study continue to be overlooked, merely because the responsible people 

 have had little or no personal experience of it. Even so observant a 

 traveller and so scholarly a statesman as Lord Curzon, already President 

 of the Eoyal Geographical Society, cut short a discussion of the place 

 assigned to geography in the Civil Service examinations with the question 

 what there was to complain of in the questions actually set. 



But it is useless to encumber existing programmes of university study 

 by the addition of formal geography to the subjects already prescribed. 

 To this extent there is reason in an objection still occasionally heard", 

 that geography is primarily and properly a school-subject, and that 

 university teaching may and should assume adequate knowledge of its 

 essentials. That indeed might be all very well if it were the fact that 

 adequate geographical study had been tlie birthright, rather than the 

 good fortune, of candidates for admission to the university, and if 

 universities took the same trouble to require this prerequisite as they do 

 with subjects in whose indispensability they really believe. And 



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