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position and direction of roads and trails; the economic importance of streams, whether they flow quietly or possess rapids and waterfalls, can also be studied. in excursions.

The various industries carried on in reach of the school offer much material. The study of such industries in themselves is not strictly geography, but when we take up a study of the conditions leading to their establishment where they are, the source of the materials with which they deal, and the reasons for the shipment of their products here and there we are dealing with geography.

The child who has actually observed the influence of a body of water upon the temperature and moisture of the air, influence of elevation on climate and production, and has noted the movements of the winds bringing fair and stormy weather, is prepared to grasp intelligently the facts concerning the distribution of the climatic features of the earth. He does not have to memorize the fact that the high plains east of the Rocky Mountains are valuable chiefly for stock-raising.

Many subjects which cannot be illustrated from excursions can be made much more real thru the use of pictures. Considering the abundance, variety, and cheapness of pictures at the present time there can be no excuse for their omission.

The matter of interest is of the greatest importance, and interest can be no more easily aroused and kept alive than by bringing the facts of geography into close touch with the interests of everyday life.

DISCUSSION

C. T. WRIGHT, Redlands, California.-The teacher who has never taken a class afield usually dreads the ordeal. This dread has been variously ascribed to lack of special training, to the new conditions of the management of children in the field, or to want of time for the field lesson and its adequate preparation.

There is no doubt but that fieldwork with children offers problems that are real and even difficult, but none that are impossible of solution. In attacking the problem the teacher can get much aid from reading, but more from the field and the child himself. To know both field and child is necessary to the correct solution. Therefore the teacher must visit in advance the place where the lesson is to be given-often more than once. The lesson must be thoroly planned-even written out. A printed (mimeographed) sheet may be given to each pupil calling attention to particular things en route that are to be noted, drawn, mapped, or discussed.

The number of pupils taken on the excursion should be small. The out-of-door lesson should be such that the pupil will welcome its return, yet it should be borne in mind that the excursion is not a picnic.

The preliminary discussion in the classroom should form a basis for the field lesson, while the field lesson in turn will furnish material for many oral or written lessons after the return of the pupils. This material will serve in subjects other than geography, thus the excursion touches several subjects of study. Time is gained, not lost, and meanwhile there is secured that desideratum in all subjects, vivid ideas.

The presence of no particular land form or industry is necessary to a successful lesson afield. Even though the relief features of the neighborhood be limited to a barbed-wire fence, let the lesson be given on that! It may afford more than one good geography lesson. The plea is for a study at first hand. From the present and the concrete, one may pass to the remote and the abstract.

EMPHASIS OF COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY

S. L. HEETER, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ST. PAUL, MINN.

I desire to discuss the subject announced under two heads. First, the origin, scope, and significance of our "new geography;" second, the place the subject should hold in elementary school programs.

The history of geographic expansion follows the history of the race down thru the centuries in every effort to inhabit and subdue the earth. Once civilization was confined to the Roman Empire and the "circle of the lands." There was no geography in that day, especially no geography beyond the foothills of the Alps to the north, and the Afric sands to the south; beyond the rocks of Gibraltar to the west, and the watersheds of the Don and the shadows of the Caucasus to the east. Then, the Mediterranean with its circle of empires was the sum-total of the civilized world, and there could be no geography until Roman shackles had been burst, which had prevented geographic expansion; no geography until after a thousand years of mediaeval darkness, after the crumbling of feudalism, after the fanaticism of the Crusades, the opening of the monasteries, the fall of Constantinople, the spread of learning and culture.

I cannot follow the genesis of a world geography. It came with the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the discovery of America, the explorations in the New World, the voyages of Marco Polo, and the circumnavigation of the globe. It came during the late centuries with the populating of the entire earth, the breaking-down of Chinese walls, and the opening of dark continents.

But our new geography has its origin, not only in the migrations of the race; it finds its principles not only in the exploration and colonization of the different quarters of the globe; for back of man's search and struggle for a comfortable existence, back of all his migrations and settlements, we always find him face to face with the controlling influences of physical nature-climate, flora, fauna, and topography; and here is the suggestion of the very first aspect of our new geography.

As man has settled the earth, its valleys, hills, and plains, its deserts, mountains, mainlands, and islands, in his struggle for existence and victory, he has faced primeval forests, unconquered streams, undrained swamps, parched deserts, and unyielding plains. He has found a natural distribution of materials. The products and treasures of land and sea have been placed here and there by natural forces, and man's first call has been to search the earth for its stores. The flora of the earth remains even today more or less localized. Natural forces have always controlled the distribution of the banana lands, rice fields, orange orchards, cotton belts, lumber regions, cactus plains, and so So also, in the course of man's globe-trotting, he has found primitive fauna ever attached to a favorable environment, the fur-bearing animal in the colder regions, the cod on the Newfoundland banks, and the marsupials in Australia. He has learned that coral could not be fished up in the Arctics, nor the oyster in Hudson Bay. The bison once belonged to the plains, and

on.

struggled even to extinction with the alkali water, the cacti, the cañons, coyotes, and cowboys of the American desert.

Here then, in the history and development of the human race, in its struggle for a world-wide existence, is the very first consideration, giving our new geography the scope and significance of a science.

But this is not all of our new geography. It is not all a study of original environments; it is not only a natural science; it comprehends more than "earth as the home of man," for man has not been content to remain subject to his surroundings. While climate and topography have operated singly and together in the distribution of life and both have played an important part, not only in the making of history, but in determining the customs and achievements of every people, yet man has not been a slave to geographical conditions. He gone forth to modify, to rise above environment, to multiply, and to subdue the earth, and there is a human, as well as a natural, interest in all this new study.

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'Tis true, man has populated the earth, the Northland and the Southland, from Scandinavia to Siberia, from Abyssinia to the islands of the sea, but wherever he has gone, he has clad himself to meet the conditions of climate; he has built to withstand the tests of seasons; he has labored for wholesome food; and has forced the earth to yield up more than her native stores. The very form and character of his effort, as revealed by the apparatus in organization of industry, show not only the process of adjustment to native environment, but a determination and a success in rising above all natural limitations. Thus the Esquimaux labors and invents, but not the same as the nomad of the desert, the planter of the flood-plain, the ranchman of the foot-hills, or the lumberman of the camps. The great double question, then, confronting the student of geography today, is, first, what physical and climatic conditions have directly influenced the different peoples of the earth, their modes of life, and their activities? Second, what have these people in turn done reacting against their geographic environment?

Our new and modern geography thus furnished two sets of causal forces, one springing from physical nature and the other from man and his enterprise. It is man and nature, rather man in nature, not man alone. Here is a geography which becomes the foundation for systematic study of the natural and descriptive sciences on the one hand, and a man's industrial, economic, and commercial development on the other.

And just a step farther. Under the stimulus of man's inventive genius, along with the evolution of modern science and inventions, intercommunication has been made perfect, barriers have been broken down, regions once isolated have been connected, continents have been linked, the whole earth has become one vast neighborhood, and every man a neighbor. Here we see the interdependence of men, the East upon the West, the West upon the East, the North upon the South, and Europe upon America. Adverse conditions in one section affect all other sections. Civilized man everywhere is dependent

upon all regions of the earth to contribute to his food, shelter, clothing, and culture; and a large part of civilized effort has been directed toward perfecting modes of travel, commerce, and intercommunication, until today streams of trade have opened into world-wide currents.

Follow the world's currents of trade and you have an index to man's varied fortune in reducing nature, or rather in learning natural laws and in conforming his life to them. Originally, he projected his routes along ready-made ways-rivers, lakes, mediterraneans, and oceans, but later he modified topography, overcame natural impediments, changed the direction of rivers, built roads of steel and rock, bridged streams, tunneled mountains, cabled the seas, wired hills and valleys, and severed continents by artificial waterways. Here emerges a new geography, a commercial geography, whose basic principles lie away back in the original conditions of physical nature and the interplay of natural forces, in the relations of the different geographic divisions of the earth, and finally, in the varied industries of men, in the policies and arts of modern producers, consumers, and exchangers.

This brings us to a conception of our new geography, triple in its aspect, physical, industrial or social, and commercial, and no school is justified in giving this subject any large place in the curriculum today unless it be conceived as a complex and composite subject closely related to, in fact underlying, almost all other sciences. Once there was no geography of the Rocky Mountains, for example, except a study of their location and elevation and their representation on colored maps. Today the student studies its Yellowstone, its Salt Lake, its palisades, parks, and cañons, but he soon runs aground in the legitimate fields of geography, and finds himself encroaching upon the territory of geology or botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, or mineralogy. Even in an elementary discussion of the influences of these mountains upon the climate of the continent, many facts must go unexplained without the principles of natural philosophy. That geography of the Rocky Mountains is incomplete which does not include a typical and detailed study of its industries, of its mining, smelting, lumbering, herding, and its method of agriculture and irrigation. A study of the various peoples of the mountains may take the direction of sociology, economics, ethnology, or government. The geography of the Rocky Mountains thus approached, and only thus, may give a true insight into, and an ability to interpret, that part of the world.

So it is in one form or another in the study of Egypt or Brazil or Alaska or Japan; so with every other region or nationality. There is no other geography worth while. It has become a mighty subject, intensely practical in our day, for the society in which the child is to move is so complex and varied in organization as to make a full treatment of this comprehensive subjectmatter seem almost imperative.

And this is the point to which we have come. If this is the scope and significance of only one of our subjects now taught in the elementary schools, what emphasis should be given it? The old geography was burdened by its

own shortcomings and so narrow was the conception of its teachers that it began and ended in drill on isolated facts, but the new geography has become after a process of so-called enrichment, so comprehensive, so far reaching in its scope, that its outlines almost bewilder, if not overwhelm, the untrained teacher.

And this single consideration remains: Where in the process of education or training is this new geography available? Can the elementary school profit by it? My conviction is, first, that colleges and normal schools must give teachers in America even today more training in this larger aspect of geography. A more thoro preparation of teachers and a more valuable equipment should be the first result of the present awakening to the facts and merits of our "new science."

There are still too many teachers, even normal trained, after a decade of enrichment of elementary subjects, that are bookish, formal, cold, and unsympathetic. The teacher of geography today should be armed with principles of wider bearing and interest in her endeavor to pilot children thru what has long been regarded by many as an arid and unteachable maze of unrelated facts. If our present geographical instruction can be freed from tradition and conservatism, if it can be brought abreast of contemporary scholarship, it will furnish a foundation for all other sciences and will become a unique and indispensable element in elementary education.

But what of the child? Can the boy and girl in the grades profit by such an extended course? We would welcome in the grades any geography which would reduce brute memorizing by focusing facts, so far as possible and practicable, about nuclei of more general principles. Our new science has broken away from the dry bones of former, lifeless matter and has brought before the teacher broad fields of materials-materials not found on maps, in textbooks, not even inside the schoolroom. The true course of study in geography today is in the great outside world of fact and interest concerning man and nature, and the best teacher must select and organize her materials from the complexity and phenomena of life about her, from the sky over her head, from the air she breathes, the ground on which she walks, the people with whom she talks, and the books she reads. That teacher is most successful, who, systematically and sympathetically, reaches into the outside world of life, gathers up its related interests, and focuses them upon the growing child.

The time has come, however, when we should be careful. The course of study in geography or in any other thing is not the final desideratum. The time has come when for the good of our schools, we should go more slowly if not call a halt on enrichment; when we should realize as school people that geographic content has been sufficiently outlined; that a comprehensive geography as a science is being forced upon us by the very organizations of modern society. We must take heed now, lest our attention to the content of study abstracted from the experiences and ability of the child may return us to the time when the branches taught seemed to be the center and the end of education.

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