Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/404

 knowledge of our own language is surely one of the leading objects of the most common education. We are of opinion that our course of instruction in the English language is altogether too limited in its scope and imperfect in its methods. This should include something more than reading, spelling, grammar, and an occasional composition. The language, in its elements and structure, should be taught on scientific principles, so far as they have been ascertained, and the power to use it in speaking and writing, not only correctly but elegantly, systematically developed from the lowest to the highest grade. Then, again, no course of instruction—however elementary—can in our day be said to be complete, which does not aim to cultivate some acquaintance with the leading outlines of natural science; and we are persuaded that, in the more advanced grades at least, a portion of the time at present given to geography might be advantageously devoted to giving instruction in botany, zoology, physics, and astronomy, by oral lessons of a simple and elementary nature."

Mr. Mill says that geography exercises none of the powers of intelligence, except the memory, and the committee declare that it does this badly; and both, we think, are right. Loading the memory with an array of arbitrary and disconnected facts is not the proper method of cultivating it. The true office of this faculty is, to be the servant of the other faculties. It is the power which recovers for present use the mind's past acquisitions. But the power of recalling past impressions rests upon the law of association, and rational memory depends upon the relations subsisting among the mental impressions. If knowledge has been digested, and the relations among its objects seen, their recovery in thought is easy and natural; but, where the other faculties are neglected, the memory is merely burdened with arbitrary statements, and only those things are remembered that are burnt into it by interminable repetition. Dr. Arnold reprobates the ordinary school-method of treating geography, and commends the point of view here indicated. He says: "And this deeper knowledge becomes far easier to remember. For my own part, I find it extremely difficult to remember the positions of towns, when I have no other association with them than their situations relatively to each other. But let me once understand the real geography of a country—its organic structure, if I may so call it; the outline of its skeleton, that is, of its hills; the magnitude and course of its veins and arteries, that is, of its streams and rivers; let me conceive of it as a whole made up of connected parts; and then the positions of towns, viewed in reference to these parts, become at once easily remembered, and lively and intelligible besides."

The objection to teaching geography to the young is, that its entire subject matter is beyond the sphere of experience; it is, therefore, much less fit to be used as a means of mental cultivation than many other subjects. Geography deals with an order of ideas which it is extremely difficult for the adult mind to grasp in their true relations, and impossible for the minds of children. "Geography is a description of the earth," and, to begin with, the earth is "a vast globe, or ball." Now, a child may have a correct conception of a ball, which it gets from experience, but it has no conception from experience which will help it to a true idea of what is meant by "25,000 miles in circumference." The notion is utterly beyond its grasp, and, so far from knowing the fact, or forming any just mental view of it, it is merely cheated with words. And so it is with the attempt to conceive the extent and relations of the great continental and