432 
GEOGRAPHY. 
MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE. 
Geography.— Such is the importance, intimately and correctly, of 
a good map of the world, upon a scale as extensive as possible, that, 
independently altogether of the character of the earth itself considered 
as a whole, no one is properly qualified for acting his part well in the 
common business of life, and no one is capable of duly appreciating the 
value of history, enjoying a book of travels, or, in short, of talking like 
a rational being about any of those countless foreign substances which 
are now met with as the materials of use or ornament, or as portions of 
food in almost every house within these kingdoms; and though we are 
not advocates for any morbid excess of legislation upon any of those 
points in the domestic conduct and economy of the people, which do not 
trench in anywise upon morality and orderly and becoming behaviour, 
yet it would be no bad rule to set the stigma of the neighbourhood 
upon every person who presumes to use any one of these articles with¬ 
out being able to tell whence it comes, what are the general character¬ 
istics of its native country, how it is grown or otherwise obtained, or 
how it is fetched to this country, and what advantage there is in using 
it,—whether as a means of innocent enjoyment, or as a stimulus to our 
industry at home. 
If folks could once be led to this, it is incalculable to conceive how 
much more delightful it would make the world we live in, because it 
would enable us to live mentally, and in our mental life consists our 
real enjoyment in all the world at once. Thus, for instance, we should 
be enabled to drink our coffee in the groves of Yemen, with turbaned 
Arabs and loaded camels around us; and under that balmy sky we 
could look athwart the Red Sea, which is there in one place an assem¬ 
blage of worm-built reefs, extending line upon line, and white with the 
foam produced by an angry wind, and in another place reeking with 
the steam of volcanic fires, while the bottom is as gay as a garden with 
the vegetation of the deep, and the waters are literally encumbered with 
living creatures. So might we drink our tea in some fantastic alcove 
in the pleasure grounds of a Chinese mandarin, and enjoy the charac¬ 
ters of that most singular country, which has remained changeless for 
hundreds of years, amid all the vicissitudes, reverses, and progressions 
of our part of the world. We should never taste the stimulating flavour 
of cinnamon, without being borne in thought to Ceylon, with its rich 
fields of rice, its beautiful copses, which furnish this wholesome and 
exhilarating spice ; its tangled and swampy woods, with their herds of 
gigantic elephants ; its more dry and inland forests, peopled with 
