INSTRUCTION IN GEOGRAPHY.
THE Royal Geographical Society would probably do well, before sending out its j roposed commission to examine into Continental ways of teaching geography, to offer a prize— a prize worth having—for the best essay on the causes of the English want of interest in that science. There is no doubt of that want ; and it is the ultimate cause of the badness of the teaching of which the Association -complains. The Society itself tells us that after years of effort it has been compelled to leave off offering prizes for geographical knowledge to the great public schools : the scholars will not compete. The same insti- tutions carried off the prizes year after year, until at last the Council decided that the experiment was hopeless, and the president, Lord Aberdare, on Monday announced to the mem- bers, in tones of resigned but regretful melancholy, that it must be discontinued. The public-school boys do not care about geography, and their indifference extends to almost all classes of the community. Even the educated know less of the science than of almost any other. A small proportion are keenly interested in it, and either insist on being taught, or manage to teach themselves so thoroughly as to be a surprise to their neighbours ; but they are almost as few as those who teach themselves astronomy, and fewer than those who learn in all sorts of empiric ways a great deal of geology. The propor- tion even of fairly cultivated men who know the whole surface of the world as they know the surface of their libraries, so as to be able to tell at once what an unusual telegram means, to place the last earthquake in the Eastern Archipelago, to localise the latest revolt in Spanish America, and to comprehend why Germans are swearing about Angra Pequefia and English arrogance, is exceedingly small ; while half even of them know nothing but the map—that is, the relative place of the country they are talking about, and the general route from Europe to the spot. They can seldom tell if it is mountainous or the reverse — (nine out of ten men expect mountains between Hamburg and Moscow) —have not an idea about its water system, and are ignorant of comparative spaces to a degree which to those who have any local knowledge is almost in- credible. It was not a foolish man who told his nephew, just starting for Calcutta, that he could ride across to Bombay on Saturdays ; nor was the clergyman ill-informed who maintained that Egypt, as a Bible country, must be at least as large as France. Englishmen with sons to settle find it a real diffi- culty to understand the size of separate States of America, or to imagine that Texas exceeds France and England put tagether ; while their capacity for remembering that Arabia is the size of all Europe west of the Vistula, and Brazil just three times that., is simply nil. Even when they are sincerely anxious to know, great distances puzzle them, and great rivers; and they talk about cities in the Soudan as if that horrible expanse were Lancashire, and wonder why steamers should not ascend the Nile to Khartoum in about ten days. As to climate, they know generally, and in the rough, whether a country is cold or hot ; but they do not know that, climatically, Hong Kong and Pekin are totally different places, that New York can be hotter than Madras or colder than Moscow, or that the reversal of the seasons which they know to be true of the Antipodes is true also of the -Cape. The writer himself failed to convince a very intelligent Englishman that Christmas was hot weather at the Cape, and that the colony might therefore supply grapes to Europe out of season, and was held to be talking nonsense when hinting that the locality whence ice was imported did matter, as all ice was not equally cold. Among the lower classes this ignorance is still more profound, reaching depths which confuse rather than as- tonish the inquirer, and this about points not in the least remote from daily experience. We have the strongest reason for sus- pecting that Essex peasants cannot believe that the distance from England to Ireland by sea is three times the distance of England from France, or that New Zealand can be five times as far away
as North America. Indeed, as a rule, the poor know literally nothing of geography, and have an aversion to learn the simplest facts, strangely in contrast with their interest about the ways of the people "over there." They will listen to any amount of talk about the people of any country that the speaker knows, often with eager interest and intelligence; but they will not even try to learn where that country is, or what are its physical features. Let any man who doubts this ask the first- workman he knows about the Chinese and China, and see how -much he knows of the former, and how absolutely nothing of the latter.
It is certainly not want of need which kills the general in- terest in geography. To Englishmen the need is perpetually present, though Lord Aberdare pressed the commercial argu- ment—as everybody speaking in London always does press it— too far. Merchants very often know very little of the markets to which they send their goods, just as stock-jobbers know very little of the States whose securities they buy and sell, both being content to know prices and not the reasons for them. Even when they do know, their knowledge is often localised in a very comic way ; and a man will understand one market for hardware perfectly without an idea of another on the other side of the globe. Still, the English deal with the world, and should be interested in its countries, -and fight most of the world, and should feel some concern about its peoples and its configuration. They do not, however, very often ; and we noticed during the Afghan war that they never realised to themselves what manner of barrier the Himalaya is, and were utterly amazed when we landed at Suakim to find that Arab tribes dwelt on the west of the Red Sea. "They would be Blacks, surely," was the hesitating remark of a very intelligent man in our own hearing. Moreover, the newspapers are getting unintelligible without some knowledge of geography. Not to mention that over-informed man on the Times who has an immoveable conviction that Englishmen know where Hun- garian towns are, and are accustomed to talk of them even when their names have no vowels, a hundred correspondents are flinging costly telegrams daily into London which, if one knows nothing about the places, must surely be dull reading. It can hardly be entertaining to hear that the President of San. Salvador is dead, when San Salvador, for all you know, may be a cape in Mars. Still, the people are not interested enough to learn. We should doubt if there were a single wandering lec- turer on geography in England, or a " professor " who taught that to evening classes, and nothing else ; and we are curious to know why. Because the teaching is bad, says the Geo- graphical Association. But that only pushes the question one step further back. As Englishmen manage to learn all they want to know, why is the teaching of geography so bad P—except, indeed, as all teaching is bad, when it is directed to a number of unequal minds in unequal stages of preparation. If the people desired geography as they desire mathematics or arithmetic, they would very soon find or import people to teach them : as, indeed, they do when war, or revolution, or earthquake wakes up a momentary interest. We suspect that, except to a few, who possess what may be called concrete imagination, geography is an exceedingly difficult study,—as difficult, at least, as statistics, and over-taxes attention, and strains the memory in a quite exceptional degree. Half the students forget a map, as they forget their own faces in the glass, and are bothered with the names of places as they would be bothered with any other unconnected words,—as you, 0 reader, were bothered when you first learned the names of the English counties. Just try, if you have no property in Ireland, to say off quickly all the Irish counties. The mind refuses a task of that kind until its interest is awakened by some external cause; and it is to discover a cause which will operate that the Association should direct its first effort. Success will certainly not be insured by calling geography "physiography," though the idea involved in the change of word is right enough; nor by using little globes, which puzzle children to death ; nor by selling thousands of skeleton maps, which make them cry with a sense of defeat. It may be found, possibly, in describing phenomena such as volcanoes, high mountain ranges, and vast seas, and so exciting the imagination ; but the road may also be in quite another direction. The popular instinct is to know all about Chinamen, and their sloping eyes, and their pigtails, and their women's little feet, and their fondness for puppy-dogs as dinner, and their inability to use perspective, before anything whatever is learned about Shanghai and the Yellow River. Suppose we obey that instinct, instead of reprehending it as frivolous, and begin the study of physiography by a little talk about folk. We have an idea that if we wanted to teach children where Lapland was, we could do it with a few pictures of Laplanders, and their dogs, and their reindeer, and their snow- shoes, and their long nights, more quickly and certainly than through any amount of maps. After half an hour's talk about the little people, the audience would be quite anxious to know where they lived in the world, and what their country was like,— would look at the map with interest, and would remember it, too.
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