which people live at certain places, called cities, where for some reason many thousands are crowded on a small area. Why are they thus crowded? Why are some cities or villages larger or smaller than others? Is this particular city larger now than it used to be? Through these observations and questions, the human element of geographical study is prominently brought forward, as it should be.

It is not only through the principle of likeness that home facts are useful in describing distant facts; the principle of contrast is no less helpful and important. The children of a city school may learn not only about other cities by comparison, but they may learn about smaller gatherings of population, as in villages; they may even expand their parks into a useful understanding of fields and forests by playing variations on dimensions. An excursion over a hill or across a valley may be extended to a great variety of lessons, about mountains and plains, large rivers and small, fertile regions and deserts. A winter cold snap illustrates the climate of the frigid zone; a summer hot spell exemplifies that of the torrid zone. A drought serves as a sample of an arid climate; a period of heavy rain introduces stories of the excessive rainfall of the equatorial belt.

In all this extension of the teachers not to be too logical. until Africa has been "studied." good narrator would, before telling a story to children out of school, ask if they had studied about the continent where the story is located; he might however wisely select for his scene an unstudied region, and thus make way for it. Here, as in certain other cases, the teacher may often in school imitate to advantage the informal methods that prevail out of school.

local to the remote, I would urge Some hesitate to mention Africa This is too formal. Surely, no

Finally, as more and more individual examples of the two fundamental classes of geographical facts accumulate, bring them into their relation. The site of a village has meaning in it; it is a consequence of some natural factors of form, or group of forms. In one case a village lies on an upland so as to be away from the steep-sided, narrow ravines that dissect a plateau; in another a village lies on a valley floor, because the hills are too high and too isolated to serve as convenient centers of population. Certain

parts of a coast line are very thinly inhabited; these generally offer poor opportunity of embarking or coming ashore. Between many miles of such coast a natural harbor may determine the location of a large city. Roads and railroads, fields and forests, farming and manufacturing all respond to geographical environment. From beginning to end, from the simplest and most apparent examples of relationships ready at hand for every teacher, to those most involved examples which the professional geographer is trying to clear up, the relation of man to the earth is a most alluring study. The attentive cultivation of home geography, taking advantage of the many examples of the two classes of geographical facts that are spread about us, affords a natural, observational, rational basis on which the larger aspects of the study may be securely founded.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Cambridge, Mass.

W. M. DAVIS.

SOME THINGS ABOUT AFRICA.

After giving a good deal of his time for fourteen years to the work M. de Lannoy de Bissy, the French military engineer, completed his map of Africa about seven years ago. The scale was I: 2,000,000 (about 32 statute miles to the inch) and it is the largest map of Africa that has yet been completed. In making it, the author says he consulted between 1,500 and 1,800 route maps and other maps of the continent, published or in manuscript, by far the larger part of which were the work of explorers within the past forty years. The world never saw before such an outburst of zeal for geographic discovery as the past half century has witnessed in Africa. So much fairly accurate information about one of the continents was never collected before in so short a time. Sixty years ago the most of inner Africa was a blank on our maps as far as accurate information was concerned. But we know a great deal more about Africa to-day than was known about North America at the time of our Revolutionary war. Three hundred years after Columbus discovered America, school children were told that the only extensive mountains in North America were the Alleghanies. Such a blunder as that would not be made to-day, by any well-read person, about any part of Africa.

Of course this great work of discovery has resulted in changing many of our ideas about Africa, a few of which are given below. Students were told, not so very long ago, that the Sahara desert was a vast, sandy waste, but we now know that far the larger part of it cannot properly be thus characterized and that most of the desert needs only water to make it a fertile, fruitful region. The idea was very common once that a large part of the desert was below sea-level and this gave rise to a project, about 25 years ago, to dig a canal, just a little south of Morocco, to admit the Atlantic waters into the western part of the Sahara and convert it into a vast inland sea with ports along the fruitful western Sudan. Our present knowledge seems to justify the conclusion that the mean elevation of the Sahara above the sea is probably about 1500 feet and we know of no depressions below the sea except in a few small areas, far east, along the northern border. We formerly saw the Kong mountains depicted with particular blackness on school maps, stretching east and west, north of the Gulf of Guinea. We now know there are no such mountains; but where they were supposed to be is the edge of an elevated plateau extending far to the north.

It was said until quite recently that not a single river along the east and west coasts afforded a navigable highway from the sea to the far interior. This is not quite true. Many years ago traders knew of what they called the Oil rivers emptying into the Gulf of Guinea, but it was not known then they were the outlets of the Niger river, parts of the most extensive delta in Africa, and that one of them might easily be ascended by small steamboats to the main channel of the Niger, then to the Benue affluent and far up that river to Yola, about 900 miles by river from the Niger delta. Though Africa is very poorly provided with rivers navigable for long distances inland from the sea, we must credit her with some advantages revealed by the discoveries of recent years. Eight years ago the Tana river, which takes its rises near Mount Kenia, was so little known that its course could not be laid down on the maps. It has since been ascended fully 300 miles by a small steamer from the Indian ocean. A little further north, the Jub river was ascended in 1891, by Capt. Dundas's steamer for 380 miles.

Until Mr. Rankin discovered in 1889 the navigable Chinde branch of the Zambesi delta, it was supposed that this, the fourth largest river of Africa, would be greatly restricted as a commercial highway because no steamer could get access to the river from the sea. The discovery of the delta considerably stimulated Zambesi commerce, which, however, may not continue because the Chinde is reported to be silting up. Artificial means will probably be employed to keep the channel clear.

The Congo railroad around the 235 miles of cataracts is now more than half completed and when it reaches Stanley Pool it will connect with steamers that can traverse the upper Congo and its tributaries for a distance estimated by Mr. Stanley eleven years ago, at about 4000 miles, but now known to be about 7000 miles.

These few facts are given simply to illustrate the changes that have been rapidly occurring in our ideas of Africa. They may be multiplied many fold in all departments of geographic study, but they are sufficient to emphasize the need of the most recent literary aids in the teaching of African geography. The great development of interest in African geography has made it possible for a teacher to acquire a very good general knowledge of Africa without expending time that only a specialist can afford to give. At last very good compendiums of our knowledge of Africa, are beginning to appear and from them the skillful teacher may derive much valuable material which will help him in the class-room not only to depict the facts but also to illustrate the principles of geography. The latest and most complete of these works in English is the "Africa," in two volumes, by Prof. A. H. Keane which appears in the new edition of "Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel; and the Afrika" of Prof. W. Sievers is a recent and excellent work in German.

Practically all the geographical text-books published in this country have recently been revised or are now in process of revision and some new works have appeared which give much of the latest and best African data. But the treatment of Africa in our text-books suffers somewhat in comparison with that of other parts of the world because the sources of information are both numerous and very recent, and the makers of school geographies do not always hit upon the best and most authoritative

sources.

To be really well equipped therefore, the teacher should have access to one of these compendiums, in which the results of the work of hundreds of explorers, and geographers are summa rized in a clear and systematic manner, by a specially qualified writer. Such compendiums of Africa and the other continents should be in the reference library of all schools that can afford the investment.

CYRUS C. ADAMS.

NEW YORK SUN.

GEOGRAPHIC INSTRUCTION IN GERMANY.

In no one subject of instruction has Germany more to teach the American schoolmaster than in the study of geography. The subject has long since attained a dignity and importance in the Fatherland which it has yet to acquire in our own country. Comenius early saw its possibilities, and Pestalozzi, at Burgdorf and Yverdon, showed what the elementary schools could do with the subject. Karl Ritter, who shaped the pedagogic tendencies of geographic instruction in Germany, spent some time in study at Yverdon under the Swiss reformer, and in his later life wrote: "Pestalozzi knew less geography than a child in our elementary schools; yet it was from him that I gained my chief knowledge of this science; for it was in listening to him that I first conceived the idea of the natural method. It was he who opened the way to me."

Since Ritter's day geography has been universally taught and well taught—not merely in the elementary schools, but continued in the high schools, and extended courses of instruction provided in the universities. When I was a student in Germany, two years ago, nineteen of the twenty-one German universities had professors of geography, Heidelberg and Rostock being the exceptions, in all forty-five men teaching the subject to university students. At Jena, Professor Peschuel-Loesche, well-known in this country, was at the head of the department. At Leipzig, in addition to the two geographic seminaries, four courses were offered the summer term of 1895 (1). General earth knowledge-historical introduction and methods of teaching the subject, four hours a week;