E— GEOGRAPHY. 117 



in 1820 (Vorhalle europaischer VolkergescMchten vor Herodot). In the 

 rejuvenation of Prussia it was Hardenberg himself who brought Niebuhr 

 from Copenhagen to the Finance Ministry in 1806, and von Stein who 

 entrusted mainly to him, under the direction of Karl Wilhelm von 

 Humboldt, the reorganisation of classical teaching in the Berlin Uni- 

 versity ; and while von Humboldt called in Wolf from Halle, on the 

 fame of his revolutionary Prolegomena, Niebuhr, reserving the recreation 

 of Roman history for himself, called August Boeckh from Heidelberg in 

 1811 as the scholar best fitted to apply ancient experience to the training 

 of a modern ci\al service. The response was the Political Economy of 

 Athens ; and it was Boeckh's greatest discovery, Karl Otfried Miiller, 

 whose Hislorieff of the Greek Peoples and Cities (of which the first 

 section appeared in 1816) brought the new geography and the new history 

 into partnership. Otfried Miiller in his turn inspired Ernst Curtius to 

 his epoch-making monograph on the Peloponnese, which was published 

 in the year of our ' Great Exhibition ' ; and before this, thanks mainly to 

 George Cornewall Lewis, Niebuhr's Lectures on Roman History, Boeckh's 

 Political Economy of Athens, and Miiller's Dorians had been vigorously 

 translated into English, and the new leaven was working briskly already 

 when George Grote was writing his History of Greece. Of Curtius' 

 Peloponnese, ' I have spent my life,' said Boeckh, in admitting the author 

 to the Berlin Academy in 1853, ' testing and sifting details, the necessary 

 foundation for further research. But you have seen the land itself, the 

 frame to the picture.' And the aged Humboldt wrote ' I have read your 

 first volume line by line. Your survey of the country is a masterpiece of 

 nature painting.' 



Well, after seventy years more, the picture begins to be worthy of the 

 frame. Whom will you allow to enjoy it ? It is not finished, nor will it 

 ever be. But a man's pupils surely are entitled to a ' private view ' of 

 his sketches in the studio of ancient geography. 



We must start, of course, with things as they are ; and if we are not 

 satisfied with things as they are — and I hope I may assume that such 

 dissatisfaction is normal and usual — we must above all things be careful 

 not to make them worse by overloading with ' new ' subjects an already 

 congested curriculum. But we are bound, no less, to take every occasion 

 of change in departments adjacent to our own, for some reduction of the 

 customary gaps, perhaps unavoidable altogether, when knowledge is 

 dissected academically into subjects, and courses, and periods of fifty 

 minutes nominal. And let me repeat here what I hinted at the outset, 

 that by ancient geography, as by ' geographical thinking ' in general, I 

 do not mean yet another obstacle to the convenient planning of a time- 

 table, but an element in the content of many courses of instruction, and 

 above all a point of view, and a fund of illustrative humanising knowledge 

 and appreciation, on the part of the teacher. The children are all right — 

 that, as teachers, we all know. If we can get the teaching right — which 

 in the first place means getting ourselves, the teachers, right — I do not 

 very much mind what ancient geography, or any other subject, is called, 

 in the syllabus or the time-table. That is why ancient geography is so 

 necessary a part of university equipment ; for it is in the universitie 

 that we prepare the teachers. 



