PREFACE. vii 



T do not think that a description of the earth, which 

 commences, by telling a child that it is an oblate spheroid, 

 moving round the sun in an elliptical orbit ; and ends, 

 without giving him the slightest hint towards under- 

 standing the ordnance map of his own county ; or any 

 suggestion as to the meaning of the phenomena ofifered by 

 the brook which runs through his village, or the gravel pit 

 whence the roads are mended ; is calculated either to interest 

 or to instruct. And the attempt to convey scientific con- 

 ceptions, without the appeal to observation, which can alone 

 give such conceptions firmness and reality, appears to me 

 to be in direct antagonism to the fundamental principles 

 of scientific education. 



" Physiography " has very little to do with this sort of 

 " Physical Geography." My hearers were not troubled with 

 much about latitudes and longitudes ; the heights of moun- 

 tains, depths of seas ; or the geographical distribution of 

 kangaroos and Composite. Neglecting such pieces of 

 information — of the importance of which, in their proper 

 places, I entertain no doubt — I endeavoured to give them, 

 in very broad, but, I hope, accurate, outlines, a view of the 

 "place in nature" of a particular district of England, the 

 basin of the Thames ; and, to leave upon their minds the 

 impression, that the muddy waters of our metropolitan river ; 

 the hills between which it flows ; the breezes which blow over 

 it ; are not isolated phenomena, to be taken as understood 

 because they are familiar. On the contrary, I endeavoured 

 to show that the application of the plainest and simplest 

 processes of reasoning to any one of these phenomena, 

 suffices to show, lying behind it, a cause, which again suggests 

 another; until, step by step, the conviction dawns upon the 

 learner that, to attain to even an elementary conception 



