At the annual meeting of the Geographical Society on Monday,
the President, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant- Duff, delivered one of his interesting addresses on the work of the Society, and the right direction of that work. He maintained that "history and geography were twin-brothers,- -each was absolutely necessary to the other,"—an assumption which we should like to contest. No doubt geography is abso- lutely essential to history, but is history to geography ? In large parts of the earth, of course, the history of men has altered the character of geography, creating towns where there were forests, and railways where there were mountains; but a good deal of geography, the geography of the Arctic regions, for example, and the geography of many portions of the Andes, has been all but wholly unaffected by history. We should maintain that geography is the elder brother, and history only the younger as well as the more fussy and restless of the two, and much the least trustworthy. Sir Mountstuart attacked briskly, as usual, that " superstition " of the classics which interferes so much with the education of boys and girls in good sound history and geography, maintaining that much of the Latin verse-making, for example, of our great schools, bears about the same relation to sound education, that teaching dogs to jump through a hoop, or to balance a piece of biscuit on their nose till they are told that it is 'paid for," bears to training the dog for its proper functions in life of discovering game or guarding its owner's property.
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