SOME LESSONS IN GEOGRAPHY 



By Edward Atkinson 



AT the request of the Secretary I 

 will venture to give the rea- 

 sons why I have made an ex- 

 ception to my recent rule of avoiding 

 any new responsibility on account of 

 advancing age, and have joined the Na- 

 tional Geographic Society. In giving 

 my reasons for this exception and my 

 sense of the importance of this organi- 

 zation I must of necessity give my per- 

 sonal experience, or a part of what the 

 artist, Chester Harding, called his rem- 

 iniscences—a chapter from my ' ' ego- 

 tistigraphy." 



When I left school, in 1842, to begin 

 work in a commission house for the sale 

 of textile fabrics I had received the or- 

 dinary instruction in geography by 

 learning lessons out of Worcester's 

 school book. After serving the custom- 

 ary apprenticeship of those days, be- 

 fore porters and janitors were employed 

 to do the heavy work, I happened to 

 enter the counting-room of the treas- 

 urer of a cotton factory, where I began 

 a course of business life, which has kept 

 me in more or less intimate relations 

 with the cotton manufacture from 1848 

 to the present time. 



It had been my practice as a youth to 

 get at the underlying facts in regard to 

 any pursuit to which my attention had 

 been called. Therefore when I found 

 that my business life might be occupied 

 in the cotton manufacture, perhaps per- 

 manently, I put to myself the question, 

 " What is cotton ? Why and how does 

 it spin ? Where is the center of pro- 

 duction ? " and so on. 



On putting these questions to my 

 elder associates I could get but little in- 

 formation. The common impression 

 among the cotton manufacturers of New 

 England was that cotton was a tropical 

 plant that could only be cultivated by 

 negroes ; that the cotton states were 



substantially tropical states, where white 

 men could not work in the field, and 

 that when the crop was being gathered 

 the whole area of the cotton states would 

 resemble the North under a snow 

 storm — white with the maturing cotton. 



This impression had been vigorously 

 promoted by the slave-holding interests 

 and led later to the opposition of what 

 were known at the time as the ' ' Cotton 

 Whigs ' ' to any efforts to remove the 

 curse of slavery. 



I then supposed, as all my associates 

 appeared to, that the reason why cotton 

 could be spun was that it was barbed or 

 bearded like rye, and that these barbs 

 interlocked in making the thread — a to- 

 tally erroneous conception. 



Not being satisfied with these condi- 

 tions, I began my own researches. I 

 procured books from the libraries and 

 strained a point to buy some books of 

 importance from my rather meager 

 earnings. I found it necessary to com- 

 prehend the physical geography, the 

 geology, the climatology, and the chem- 

 istry of the soils of all the cotton-pro- 

 ducing countries; the chemistry of the 

 plant, and the social conditions of each 

 cotton-producing section. Of course, 

 this was a matter of long, tedious, and 

 often misdirected study; but in the end 

 I had attained a considerable amount of 

 geographical knowledge. In fact, it may 

 be said that when one picks out a lock of 

 cotton from the boll in the cotton field, 

 twists it with his fingers, and, doubling 

 with the teeth, makes a strong cord 

 without the aid of any mechanism, he 

 may find in his imagination his counter- 

 part in the Aryan woman of prehistoric 

 time, who, taking a lock of cotton from 

 the boll in India and going through with 

 the same process, made the first piece of 

 cotton cord ; and then as he untwists 

 that strand or follows its convolutions 



