Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/293

Rh with biography, remain empty dreams, giving birth to wretched books like Grube's, not useful to children or to young people, or to teachers, or to the public in general. In fact, if the authors of these so-called new guides in geography and history thought of what they wanted, and attempted to apply these books to instruction, they would become convinced of the impossibility of the enterprise.

In the first place, geography, in conjunction with the natural sciences and ethnography, would constitute a prodigious science, for the teaching of which a human lifetime would not suffice, and a science still less childlike and still dryer than geography alone.

In the second place, for the composition of such a manual, sufficient material would not be found in a thousand years. If I taught the geography of the Krapivensky District, I should be compelled to give the pupils detailed notions of the flora, the fauna, the geological formation of the country up to the North Pole, and details regarding the inhabitants and the trade of the kingdom of Bavaria, because I should have plenty of material for these details, and I should have almost nothing to say of the Byelevsky and Yefrimovski Districts, because I should have no materials for that.

But the children and sound common sense demand from me a certain harmony and regularity in teaching. The only thing remaining is either to make them learn Obodovsky's geography by heart, or not teach the subject at all. Just as for history the historical interest must be awakened, so for the teaching of geography the geographical interest must be awakened. And the geographical interest, according to my experience and observation, is awakened either by study of the natural sciences or by travels, especially in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred by travels.

As the love of history is stimulated by the reading of newspapers, and especially of biographies, and by the interest in the political life of one's country, so for geography the first step toward the study of science is taken