Xciv PROCEEDINGS OP THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I903, 



cations for the geologist and the geographer, and indeed for all 

 students of those sciences and arts in which facts and phenomena 

 have to be arranged in their order of distribution, is a familiarity 

 with the use of maps and a knowledge of how they are constructed. 

 But one of the commonest results of the present modes of giving 

 instruction in maps and map-making in most schools is to cause 

 this kind of knowledge to become distasteful to the learner. And 

 the consequence is that for one fairly well-educated man who 

 can read a good map of his own native district, there are hundreds 

 to whom this is impossible. A detailed topographical map or 

 a geological map is practically a mystery to the average man ; 

 and yet the training which would have enabled him to appreciate 

 and enjoy them both might, if given properly in his early years, 

 have afforded him many a pleasant and interesting break in the 

 monotony of his ordinary school-work. He has doubtless been 

 shown in his geographical classes the ordinary maps of the world, 

 and those of the continents and his own country ; he has perhaps 

 copied some of them laboriously in manuscript, and very probably 

 passed examinations in drawing them from memory. But they 

 were always more or less dead things to him, because they dealt 

 with lands and districts which he had never beheld, and not with 

 the familiar objects of the school and the home. He has never seen 

 them grow up before his own eyes, built up from facts collected by 

 himself and his fellows. 



We should like to see the lower classes of all schools making a 

 map of their own schoolroom and playground. We should like 

 to see the scholars at a higher stage studying and exercised in 

 the largo scale 25-inch map of the locality, with the school in the 

 centre ; those at a higher stage engaged on the 6-inch map of the 

 neighbourhood ; and so on. Stage by stage the scholars might pass 

 to the study of the 1-inch map of the district or county. Then, 

 when once these maps had become familiar objects, the learners 

 should be taken out on occasional excursions into the country 

 with the maps in their hands, and educated in some of the higher 

 grades of that Earth-Knowledge which can only be seen and 

 appreciated in the open air. Later on the scholars might pass to 

 the study of natural agencies, the origin and meaning of landscape, 

 to geology proper, and thence to the study of the intimate relations 

 of nature and man. 



But it must be acknowledged that the present lack of this kind 

 of instruction is not to be wholly ascribed to the teachers. Good 



