Abstract
IT seems impossible to get any full and authentic account of the doings of the recent International Geographical Congress held at Venice, so that at present it is difficult to say how much it did for the promotion of the subject with which it is connected. Congratulatory addresses seem to have been a prominent feature, and much time was devoted to the subject of interoceanic canals, with special reference to those across the isthmuses of Panama and Corinth. If the Congress itself was disappointing, the Exhibition in connection therewith appears to have been a great success. It was a striking illustration of the dimensions which geographical science has now attained. Maps and charts and globes ancient and modern we should of course expect to find; sextants and compasses also, as well as tents and hammocks, and other paraphernalia of the explorer. But besides the exhibits to which geography can lay special claim, nearly every other science was laid under contribution in one way or another. Geology and meteorology, botany and zoology, and ethnology, and even chemistry and physics, have been placed under levy to help in forming the multifarious departments to which geography now lays claim. This wide extension of a subject, which at one time had little claim to be considered scientific, has its advantages and disadvantages. It has reached its widest limits on the Continent in Germany, where there are chairs of geography, whose professors, to judge from their programmes and their text-books, would require to be almot omniscient. If a student faithfully follows the course thus chalked out, he ought to end by having a fair knowledge of all the sciences. And it comes to be a question whether the same object might not be attained by beginning at the other end. Why, it may be asked, might not the student begin by acquiring a knowledge of the principles and facts of the sciences concerned, and apply them afterwards to the special subject of geography? At the sametime, it must be confessed, to have a complete knowledge of the geography of the world, a little of everything is necessary; and the Continental conception of the subject is certainly preferable to the bald and dry idea entertained of it in this country, as exhibited in most of our text-books. Happily better things may be looked for in the future with the use of such text-books as Green's “Geography of the British Isles,” and the late Keith Johnston's Geographical Handbook. While geography thus levies tribute on all the sciences, it must be admitted that in return she largely pays back her debt in the multitude of new data brought home by the best of her pioneers. Unfortunately all explorers do not start with that knowledge of the sciences which would greatly increase their observing capacity. Every explorer is not a Livingstone or a Holub, a Prejevalsky or a Maclay; and for such especially, as also for missionaries, a course of geography similar to that which prevails at the German Universities would be a decided advantage. For practical, and especially for school purposes, it is well that some limit; should be defined as to the sphere of geography; the happy medium has, we think, been well struck by M. Elisée Réclus in his magnificent “Géographie Universelle,” which, when complete, will no doubt form a mine for compilers of text-books.
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Geography, National and International . Nature 24, 577–579 (1881). https://doi.org/10.1038/024577a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/024577a0