The practice of beginning the study of geography with the locality
in which the pupil lives, in order that his first ideas of geographical
conceptions may be gained from observation directed upon the real
conditions existing about him, has been steadily gaining adherence
during the past few years as a rational method of entering upon the
study of geography.
After the pupil has finished an elementary study of the locality, he
is ready to pass to an elementary consideration of the world as a whole,
to get his first conception of the planet on which he lives. His
knowledge of the forms of land and water, his knowledge of rain and
wind, of heat and cold, as agents, and of the easily traced effects
resulting from the interaction of these agents, have been acquired
by observation and inference upon conditions actually at hand; in
other words, his knowledge has been gained in a presentative manner.
His study of the world, however, must differ largely from this, and
must be effected principally by representation. The globe in relief,
therefore, presents to him his basic idea, and all his future study
of the world will but expand and modify this idea, until at length,
if the study is properly continued, the idea becomes exceedingly
complex.
In passing from the geography of the locality to that of the world
as a whole, the pupil is to deal broadly with the land masses and their
general characteristics. The continents and oceans, their relative
situations, form, and size, are then to be treated, but the treatment
is always to be kept easily within the pupil's capabilities--the end
being merely an elementary world-view.
During the time the pupil is acquiring this elementary knowledge of
the world as a whole, certain facts of history may be interrelated
with the geographical study.
According to the plan already suggested, it will be seen that the pupil
is carried out from a study of the limited area of land and water about
him to an idea of the world as a sphere, with its great distribution
of land and water. In this transference he soon comes to perceive how
small a part his hitherto known world forms of the great earth-sphere
itself.
Something analogous to this transition on the part of the pupil to
a larger view seems to be found in the history of the western nations
of Europe. It is the gradual change in the conception of the world
held during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the enlarged
conception of the world as a sphere which the remarkable discoveries
and explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought
about.
The analogy serves pedagogically to point out an interesting and
valuable _interrelation_ of certain facts of history with certain
phases of geographical study.
This book has been prepared for the purpose of affording material for
such an interrelation. The plan of interrelation is simple. As the
study of the world as a whole, in the manner already sketched,
progresses, the appropriate chapters are read, discussed, and
reproduced, and the routes of the various discoverers and explorers
traced. No further word seems to the writer necessary in regard to
the interrelation.
DRESDEN, July 15, 1899.