Abstract
THE idea of holding an International Geographical Exhibition at Paris, the opening of which we announced last week, in connection with the Geographical Congress which opens in a day or two, was a happy one, and has so far been fruitful in results. The catalogue of articles exhibited covers about 450 octavo pages, and the daily number of visitors reaches thousands; last Sunday it was 12,000, including the Sultan of Zanzibar, and other visitors of all ranks and classes of society. No better method could have been adopted of showing the advances made in geography in recent years; how from being a mere record of “hairbreadth 'scapes by flood and field,” it has become a complicated science, or rather meeting-ground of all the sciences; for, as the equipment of and instructions to the English Arctic Expedition show, it requires the aid of all the sciences to do its work well, and in return carries contributions back to them all. We have no doubt that the great majority of the visitors to the Exhibition will be astonished that geography has so many and so varied apparatus and results to show, and we hope that the Exhibition and Congress will be the means of awakening in France, as well as in other countries, an increased interest in geography, lead to its being raised to a higher platform in education, and to its being taught in a more comprehensive and more scientific way than hitherto. No doubt this will be but the first of a series of such exhibitions and congresses, though probably not annual, and we hope that the next one will be held in London. We think they are well calculated to give a strong stimulus to the scientific study of geography.
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The International Geographical Exhibition . Nature 12, 257–258 (1875). https://doi.org/10.1038/012257a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/012257a0