Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/38

 ceived from that which has overtaken the biological sciences. The better teaching of these subjects lays representative forms before the student and requires him to examine their parts minutely. The importance of the parts is not judged merely by their size, but by their significance also. From a real knowledge of these few types and their life history it is easy to advance in school days or afterwards to a rational understanding of a great number of forms. Few students ever go so far in school as to study the forests of North America or the fauna of South America. It is sufficient for them to gain a fair acquaintance with a good number of the type forms that make up these totals. It is quite time that geography should as far as possible be studied in the same way. No school boy can gain a comprehensive idea of the structure of a continent until he knows minutely the individual parts of which continents are composed. No explorer can perceive the full meaning of the country he traverses, or record his observations so that they can be read intelligently by others until he is fully conversant with the features of geographic types and with the changes in their expression as they grow old. Both scholar and explorer should be trained in the examination and description of geographic types, not necessarily copies of actual places, before attempting to study the physical features of a country composed of a large number of geographic individuals. When thus prepared, geography will not only serve in geologic investigation, it will prosper in its proper field as well.

Geographic description will become more and more definite as the observer has more and better type forms to which he may liken those that he finds in his explorations, and the reader, taught from the same types, will gather an intelligent appreciation of the observer's meaning. Take the region north of Philadelphia above referred to. Having grown up upon it, I called it a hilly country, in accordance with the geographic lessons of my school days, and continued to do so for twenty years or more, until on opening my eyes its real form was perceived. It is a surface worn down nearly to a former base level but now diversified by ramifying valleys, cut into the old base level in consequence of a subsequent but not very ancient elevation of a moderate amount. Maturity is not yet reached in the present cycle of development, for there is still much of the old base level surface remaining, into which the valleys are gnawing their head ravines and thus increasing the topographic differentiation. Perhaps not more