Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/496

478 The study of the one dissecting map was pursued uninterruptedly for six months. In a few weeks the child had learned to identify and name each piece, either on her model or on other maps, and could put each in its place. Before she left the map she was able to bound any State with the models, or verbally; also to make strips of successive States, beginning at any point and running in any direction. With the entrance upon her second year, at the age of five and a half, the child began the study of maps from "Cornell's Geography." But in a very little while these were exchanged for a large relief-globe. From the time the child began the study of this globe it became difficult for me to understand how any other method could ever be employed. The picturesque effect of the distinctly outlined continents, visible at a considerable distance, separated by vast tracts of desolate ocean, in which, as the child remarked, "one could easily drown," the mutual relations of parts whose perception need never be disturbed, as is incessantly done when the pupil passes from map to map—all these effects and impressions can be obtained from nothing else but from a globe of adequate size and in relief. The child, when just six, began to draw maps from this globe. On a single very large piece of paper would be represented whatever outlines were discoverable at the maximum distance and at a certain aspect of the globe. The latter was then revolved somewhat, the child remaining at the same distance, and a new map outlined as before, and so on until the entire globe had been, in the major outlines, copied by the child. It was reserved for months of future study to fill in the details in proportion to their successive natural, not political, importance.

Four different spheres of thought were prepared for by this study. First, and most obviously, the foundations were laid for all knowledge of physical geography. This foundation was laid in vivid sense impressions, and unalloyed with the singular mess of political, historical, and commercial details, with which even the best geographical textbooks for children are filled, and which are quite irrelevant to the main issue. When the child could with her finger trace the watercourses all around the world, she received a large fundamental impression not easily forgotten. Incidentally in this tracing she learned the value of canals at the Isthmuses of Suez and Panama. Secondly, a solid foundation was laid for history. The first map drawn was of Africa, on account of its simplicity of outline; but this involved the basin of the Mediterranean. The second map, passing eastward, took in the strongly accentuated outlines surrounding the Indian Ocean, and indicated the Himalaya and the high table-lands of Northern India. In the future it was intended, with these same outlines under the eye, and the picture of them deeply graven on the brain, to indicate the descent of Aryan ancestors from these table-lands toward the Mediterranean basin the germinal spot of our historical world; thence the further spread westward to the new hemisphere. The conception of an