January 21, 1887.] 



SGIENCU. 



49 



most of them of no possible importance to the 

 student. Indeed, so far and wide has this erro- 

 neous idea of geography spread, that there are 

 books actually made for the purpose of teaching 

 this sort of thing. For instance : there is a com- 

 piler who has been known to assert, and to assert 

 with pride, that, by the use of his book, one might 

 learn the names of seventeen thousand places in 

 the course of a few years. Just as though there 

 were any object in one's turning one's self into a 

 walking gazetteer, when gazetteers in plenty 

 could be found on the shelves of a neighboring 

 library ! In fact, one is irresistibly reminded of 

 the paragraph in the introduction to Mrs. Green's 

 ' Short geography of the British Islands,' the in- 

 troduction being the work of the brilliant writer, 

 though inaccurate historian, the lamented J. R. 

 Green. He says : — 



"No drearier task can be set for the worst of 

 criminals than that of studying a set of geograph- 

 ical text-books, such as the children in our schools 

 are doomed to do. Pages of ' tables,' — ' tables ' 

 of heights and ' tables ' of areas, ' tables ' of 

 mountains and ' tables ' of tablelands, ' tables ' of 

 numerals, which look like arithmetical problems, 

 but are really statements of population, — these, 

 arranged in an alphabetical order or disorder, form 

 the only breaks in the chaotic mass of what are 

 amusingly styled ' geographical facts,' but which 

 turn out to be simply names, — names of rivers 

 and names of hills, names of countries and names 

 of towns, — a mass rarely brought into grammati- 

 cal shape by the needful verbs and substantives, 

 and dotted over with isolated phrases about 

 mining here and cotton-spinning there, which 

 pass for industrial geography. Books such as 

 these, if books they must be called, are simply 

 appeals to the memory : they are handbooks of 

 mnemonics, but they are in no sense handbooks 

 of geography." 



This, of course, applies more particularly to 

 British geographical text-books. But, so far as 

 the present writer can see, the same remarks are 

 applicable to many of our most popular (with the 

 teachers) text-books. That this is so, is no reflec- 

 tion on the teachers : it is the fault of their early 

 education. And for this our college and normal 

 school authorities are more especially responsible. 

 The evidence that improvement in such respects 

 must come from the university downwards seems 

 to be irresistible. Nor should the publishers be 

 blamed. If they could see the evidence of the 

 demand for better school-books, — books that were 

 not miniature gazetteers, — they would undoubt- 

 edly supply it. I remember only a year ago taking 

 a set of the best and most popular school-maps 

 made in Germany to a well-known and enterpris- 



ing publisher of text-books. I suggested that per- 

 haps some arrangement could be made with the 

 German publisher by which the maps could be 

 adapted to the use of English-speaking scholars. 

 The gentleman very frankly replied that he could 

 not sell a set of the maps, even if the names 

 were in English. He added, that our people 

 wanted maps colored differently ; that is, so as to 

 obscure the physical features. A short tinae after- 

 wards the same publisher brought out a set of 

 maps of the United States with little angles 

 marked on them so that the scholars could draw 

 the state lines with accuracy, as though that was 

 the end of geographical education. But it was 

 not his fault. His business was to supply the de- 

 mand, not to get out good maps. 



If the learning of seventeen thousand names ' in 

 a few years,' or the ' bounding ' of countless states, 

 or the making of maps that will look well on ex- 

 hibition, is not the end of geographical teaching, 

 what is the use of teaching it at all ? What is the 

 aim of geographical education ? 



In the first place, geography, properly studied, 

 gives one a clear and accurate knowledge of the 

 physical conformation of the earth's surface. This 

 is physical geography, and should be studied first. 

 But this is not the mere learning of ' tables of 

 heights,' etc. It is something entirely different. 

 One may have a very good knowledge of the 

 formation of the earth, and yet be densely igno- 

 rant of the height of the Karakorum range. And, 

 as a general rule, the less of such stuff crammed 

 into a child's head, the more physical geography 

 he will know. He should rather be taught to 

 observe phenomena. It is true that such knowl- 

 edge is hard to get at on examination ; but that is 

 not so much the fault of the knowledge as of the 

 examination. Then the flora and fauna of each 

 region of the earth's surface should be properly 

 associated in a child's mind. In this connection, 

 it may be said that nothing is less calculated to 

 convey this knowledge than the ideal or ' model 

 landscapes ' too often to' be found in our school- 

 rooms. Geography aims also to teach the influ- 

 ence of geographic factors upon the development 

 of the human race. This influence is frequently 

 exaggerated. But the working-out of such prob- 

 lems, even on insufficient data, must have a stim- 

 ulating effect upon the mind. It may be said that 

 the teaching of the distribution of the flora be- 

 longs rather to botany. So undoubti§dly any de- 

 tailed study of the various floras does belong to 

 botany. But a knowledge sufficient to enable one 

 to assign to any given region its appropriate 

 plant-life, and to trace the influence of that floral 

 environment on man, is surely within the domain 

 of geography. 



