The International Geography

Abstract

SOME forty years ago geography was the most dreary of subjects in school lessons. Its text-books were as arid as the Sahara, lists of names and compilations of statistics; mere cram, without a single statement or principle which could help the learner to understand the history either of the earth or its inhabitants; useful as exercise for the memory, but baneful in every other respect. All that has been changed. Geography is nw taught as illustrative of principles. Like geology, it is an application of a group of the natural sciences to explain a particular problem, the history of the earth; differing however, from that in dwelling more on the superficial aspect—the physiography—of our globe, and less on underlying causes or on the remote past. The volume before us is an example of the new method. Though too large for direct use as a text-book in schools, for it consists in all of over 1100 pages of rather closely-printed type (which ageing eyes will wish thicker), it will filter down to the classes through the teachers. The first part of the work deals with the principles of geography, the more distinctly scientific aspect of the subject, in a series of excellent essays, which treat of the principles and progress of geography, its relation to mathematics, the making of maps, the plan of the earth and the features of its surface, the ocean, atmosphere and climate, the distribution of life, including the races of man, and the political aspect of geography; all these subjects being discussed by very high authorities. Each of the following parts is devoted to one of the great divisions of the earth, treating it first as a whole, and then under its minor natural or political divisions, in a series of separate articles, each of which is contributed by “a specialist or recognised authority of high standing.”

The International Geography.

Seventy Authors. Edited by Hugh Robert Mill, D.Sc. Pp. xx + 1098. With 488 illustrations. (London: George Newnes, Ltd., 1899.)