Editorial. 



Among the incidental effects of the warbetween the United 

 States and Spain will be an awakening to geographic and geo- 

 logic relations. Even while war was but an anticipation there 

 was not a little brushing up of rusty geography. Now that it is 

 on the study will begin in earnest. And there is need of- it. 

 Not a few prognoses of the coming campaign, gravely announced 

 and seriously discussed by the press correspondent, or the pub- 

 lic functionary, or the club oracle, have been little less than 

 absurd through their neglect of geographic relationships. 

 Among the masses, and even among people of education, fore- 

 casts of quite possible eventualities of the war have been com- 

 mingled with imagined eventualities which geographic relations 

 altogether prohibit. Even to those fairly well informed the 

 awakenings of the war will bring the rectification of many a 

 false impression and not a little accession of fresh geographic 

 knowledge. Just at this moment when one Spanish fleet is 

 reported to have left Cadiz and another St. Vincent, and their 

 destination is a matter of intense solicitude, it will perhaps come 

 as a revelation to most of us that the Cape Verde Islands are 

 nearer Boston than is Cadiz; that they are nearer Maine than 

 Cuba; that St. Vincent is less distant from every American port 

 on the Atlantic coast than it is from Havana. Both Spanish 

 fleets when they set sail (if indeed they did) were nearerall 

 our Atlantic ports than they were to Admiral Sampson's fleet. 



There is, therefore, ample [occasion for brushing the dust 

 from our atlases and for the application of rule and compass 

 to them with due regard to the" 7 mode of map projection. 

 Beyond question the people of this republic will very generally 

 become better instructed in the geography of the north-central 



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