GEOGRAPHIC LITERATURE 39 



results of the wide experience of Professor Wm. M. Davis and Mr Ward in teach - 

 ing meteorology during the j^ast fifteen 3'ears at Harvard Tlniversits'. It may 

 even be descriijed as the natural outcome of the methods of teaching this sub- 

 ject that the present writer inaugurated in 1881-'82 for the guidance of the pupils 

 of the Normal School at Washington. Our ideas with regard to education, in 

 meteorology as in every other branch of science, have now come to agree on one 

 fundamental principle, viz., that personal experience, laboratory practice, and 

 individual work are infinitely superior as methods of instruction to the old- 

 fashioned study of text-books. School boards and parents must demand and 

 teachers must be able to give this higher sort of instruction before it can become 

 common in the schools. To this end Mr Ward's "Practical Exercises" will 

 powerfulh' contribute. 



Mr Ward begins by requiring the pupil (and why not also the teacher?) to 

 keep his own personal record of the weather. At first no instruments are to be 

 used, but afterward the thermometer, anemometer, rain gauge, psychrometer, 

 and bai'ometerare successively introduced ; eventually the nephoscope, thermo- 

 graph, and barograph appear. The use of these instruments of course implies 

 that the observer shall have a general understanding of their methods of action, 

 the errors to which they are subject, and the application of the numerical cor- 

 rections that are given in the tables also published in Mr Ward's book. 



It is not designed or desired that the classes for which this book is written 

 should go very deeply into the complex problems of meteorology. As Mr Ward 

 says, complicated matters should be left to later years. "The teacher who has a 

 fairly good knowledge of one comprehensive modern text book of meteorology 

 will find himself sufficiently well equipped to answer the questions that will be 

 put by the class." The first care of the teacher must be to stimulate good habits 

 of observation and of careful generalization ; the search for hidden causes and 

 true explanations must come later. "The interest of a class can easily be kei>t 

 up throughout a school year by means of a progressive system of observations." 

 The study of the weather should be begun in the lower, if not the lowest, grades 

 of the ordinary grammar school. It is therefore necessary that teachers should 

 have studied tlie subject previously in their normal schools, a fact that the em- 

 ployees of the Weather Bureau have for twenty years past been constantly em- 

 phasizing. Mr Ward believes that the higher instrumental observations, such 

 as the barometer, psychrometer, and nephoscope, may be profitably undertaken 

 in the high school years if not in tiie last year of the gramuiar school. 



Chapters IV-VII deal with the weather map, its construction and use ; chap- 

 ter IX with the direction of the wind in its relation to the gradient of pressure, 

 and chapter X with the velocity of the wind. After this follow the chapters on 

 cyclones and anticyclones, methods of studying the winds, the weather se- 

 quences, the temperatures of the air at different heights, the diurnal variation 

 of direction ami velocity of wind. Finally, the observation and formatiou of 

 dew, frost, and clouds completes flu; ))i)()k, which is full of good suggestions to 

 both teachers and sciiolars. 



Fortunately, meteorology may bi' stiidicd in city schools quite as satisfactorily 

 as in the country, as has been abundantly demonstrated by every-day experi- 

 ence in Brooklyn. 



