Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/900

818 development within the comprehension of children. It is not hard to conceive a country of hills and valleys as a surface partly worn toward a goal of lowland denudation, and then to find in the forms visible from the schoolhouse window ever-varying episodes in this history. It is not to be understood that this larger conception will be put upon the pupil at the outset; he will rather proceed from the minor passages of the land history to its main and grand movement. The brook, gravel bank, ravine, and hillock will lead to a mental picture of the township, county, State, and continent. And it is not to be forgotten that the animals and plants, clouds and storms, climate and productions, highways, cities, and all other material of geography will have their place in the teaching; it is only held that they will gather new meaning as they take their places in a comprehensive scheme of geographic development. It is of small account that the new teaching has what may be called a geologic aspect; names matter little when the only rational knowledge of geography is concerned.

Prof. W. B. Powell has given in the National Geographic Magazine an elaborate outline of the progress in the public schools of Washington toward such a rational understanding of the geography of the United States, beginning with the particular and working toward the general, in the field and by laboratory methods, as with specimens, maps, drawing, and sand modeling. The fullest pedagogical statement of the meaning and needs of the new geography for schools below college grade is contained in the Conference report on geography, to which reference has been made. The names appended to it stamp it as a representative utterance, and it is enough here to refer the interested reader to the document itself, only citing the final paragraph of the discussion of it by President Eliot's committee: "They (the Conference) recommend a study of physical geography, which would embrace in its scope the elements of half a dozen natural sciences and would bind together in one sheaf the various gleanings which the pupils would have gathered from widely separated fields. There can be no doubt that the study would be interesting, informing, and developing, or that it would be difficult and in every way substantial."

Geography is winning its way to a place in the college and the university. Objection has been raised for the reason tersely stated by some one that the subject is "a graphy and not a logy." But we have seen that the new geography is not only a descriptive and distributive body of truth; it is historical and causal. The older geography has allied itself, so far as it has had place in the university, chiefly with history. The new geography offers a yet larger contribution to history, but will ally itself more closely