Maury's New Elements of Geography for Primary and Intermediate Classes

Front matter

Maury's New

Elements of Geography

for

Publishers' Preface

PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

Matthew F. Maury won fame not merely as a geographer, but as a scientist. It was in recognition of his work in making geography a science, that every nation of Europe honored him with degrees, decorations, and medals, and that Humboldt, the great naturalist, asked Prussia to add to these a duplicate of the Cosmos Medal of Science, which had been given to Humboldt himself.

In his series of geographies, Maury refused to follow the plan of all the accepted text-books of that day. His plan was to present, in simple words and in the form of a story, interesting facts about the different people of the earth, their homes, their industries, and the lands where they live; and at the same time to call attention to those physical laws which largely determine the condition, the character, and the industries of a people. As he himself expresses it: "While the author has reproduced in the pupil's mind the same vivid pictures of the various parts, places and objects of the globe, which as an eye-witness he himself retains, he has constantly aimed at pointing out geographical laws, and at giving learners glimpses into the terrestrial machinery."

When published, these geographies were such a radical departure from the old methods, that many teachers were not prepared to accept them; but leading educators have gradually come to Maury's position, and to-day the principles that he advocated are endorsed by the Committee of Fifteen of the National Educational Association.

The special features to which attention is called are:

1st. The Home, the Center of Thought.—The study of the world is begun at the home of the pupil, and other countries and places are presented in their relation to it.

2d. The Earth as a Unit.—In the first thirty pages the earth is presented as a unit, and in the pages that follow, this conception of it is at all times kept before the pupil. The continents are then taken up more fully, and after the pupil is familiar with the details of each continent, a review is given which leads him to look at the continent as a whole and in its relation to the earth as a unit.

3d. Relief Maps.—Political maps teach the names of political divisions, of mountains, rivers, etc., all of which are purely arbitrary. After these names are learned, relief maps follow. These picture to the eye the physical features of the continents. By locating upon the relief map those features with which he is already familiar, the pupil can see the physical reasons for many of the facts that he has learned. If preparatory oral lessons are given, the relief map should then be used first.

4th. The Earth as the Home of Man.—The idea of the earth as the home of man is the chief thought of the book. The full-page colored illustrations serve to accentuate this thought by giving vivid pictures of the people of each continent and of the homes in which they live.

5th. The Lessons.—Each lesson presents interesting facts in the form of a story to be read by the pupil. The teacher may talk with her class about each lesson, and may ask her own questions to develop thought and fix important facts in the child's mind.

6th. Illustrations.—The illustrations are all from photographs and are accurate. Each picture teaches some definite idea, and the descriptive text under many of them makes the pictures an integral part of the lessons.

The colored relief maps are used by permission of Mr. C. L. Patton, who designed them and who also selected the new illustrations and planned the course of instruction which they embody. We take pleasure also in acknowledging the valuable suggestions received from several distinguished educators, and in thanking our correspondents in all the leading countries of the world who have furnished many of the photographs that appear in this volume.

CONTENTS

Copyright, 1881 and 1900, by the University Publishing Company. Copyright, 1907, by American Book Company.

Introductory Lessons

LESSON I.

WHAT GEOGRAPHY MEANS.

1. Homes.—Some boys and girls have homes in the country. The two boys that you see in the picture live in a pleasant valley near the mountains. These boys see around them fields of wheat and corn. They see a wagon drawn by oxen, carrying wheat to the barns. A man is driving a flock of sheep along the road, and a train of cars is approaching the village. Far away in the distance, they see the high mountains.

Some boys and girls have homes in cities. They may see long streets like the one in the left-hand picture, and other streets going in every direction. On some of these streets there are stores; on others there are homes where people live; passing through the streets are street cars, wagons, and carriages, and on the sidewalks busy people are going and coming.

Some boys and girls have homes near the seashore. They may see the blue waters and the waves dashing against the rocks or rolling up on the sandy beach.

Children living in different places may see very different things. But all these things are the earth. The mountains, the sea, the fields, the gardens, the woods, the dusty roads, and streets, the land on which our homes are built, are all parts of the earth. 2. The Earth is very large. Near our homes we can see only a small part of it. When we go away from our homes in any direction, we see other parts where other people live. These people may be very different from us, and their homes quite unlike ours. Everywhere we find them doing some kind of work, which may also be quite different from the work that we do.

The story about the different people that live on the earth, about their homes and what they do, is called geography.

For Recitation.—What can you see in the first picture? in the picture on the left hand? In the picture on the right hand? Have you ever visited the country, the city, or the seashore? What were the people doing there? What kinds of houses did you see? What plants or animals? Can you think of some place that you would like to visit and learn about? What must you study in order to learn about these places?

Direction

LESSON II.

DIRECTION.

Preparatory Oral Work.—Impress carefully upon the minds of pupils the necessity of fixed, unchangeable points of direction, which can be understood by everybody.

Ask the pupils to point to the right; to the left; before them; behind them. Then show that all these directions are variable in their meaning. Thus: Who sits on your right hand? On your left? In front of you? Behind you? Turn round. Who is on your right now? Behind you? Before? On your left? Point to the right. Turn round. Point to the right now. Does pointing to the right, to the left, in front, or behind always give you the same direction?

This photograph was taken at noon; the car tracks run north and south. Notice that at noon shadows always fall toward the north.

Having shown the indefiniteness of such expressions for directions as right, left, before, behind, pass on to a thorough drill on the fixed directions. Let this be repeated daily, until every pupil can point, without hesitation, to the four principal directions, and to the four half-way directions.

Ask on which side of the schoolroom the sun rises. On which side it sets. Which is the east side of the pupils' desks? Which the west? The north? The south? Who sits to the east, west, north, and south of them? In what direction the teacher's desk is? In what directions the children go from school to their homes; and in what directions they come from their homes to school.

A weathervane.—The arrow always points in the direction from which the wind blows.

Let them tell in what directions the most familiar objects, such as the church, the post-office, or the city hall, are from their school and homes.

Vary the drill and exercises. In taking up the drill work in connection with different lessons, avoid as far as possible asking the questions in exactly the same words.

1. What Direction Means.—Suppose you are going for the first time to visit the home of a friend. One question that you will ask before starting will be, "Which is the way?" If you do not know the way you may be lost.

Now the way to a place is called direction.

And when we are learning about any people or places, one of the things we wish to know is, in what direction they are from us.

We may learn about direction from the sun. The part of the sky where it rises is called the east. So if, some bright morning, we are walking with the sun shining in our faces, we cannot help knowing that we are going toward the east.

The part of the sky where the sun sets is called the west. The west is just opposite the east. If we walk so that the setting sun shines in our faces, we are going toward the west.

If we walk with the morning sun upon our right sides, we shall be going toward the north. If we should meet a boy walking in the opposite way, he would be going toward the south.

The sun, we see, helps us to learn the principal directions, north, south, east and west. These are what we call fixed points.

If the place to which we are going lies half-way between the north and east, its direction is northeast. If it is half-way between north and west, the direction is northwest. If the place is half-way between south and east, the direction is southeast. And if it is half-way between south and west, the direction is southwest.

From what we have now learned we see that when the sun shines it is easy to tell in what direction we are going. But there is something that shows direction even better than the sun.

Sometimes people are days and days at sea without seeing the land, and with nothing but sky above them and water all around. Often the sky is covered with clouds, and the sun cannot be seen. How do they know which way to go? They use what is called the compass. In it there is a little needle made of steel that always points toward the north.

With a compass, therefore, we can always tell which way is north. And if we know where north is, we can also tell where the south, the east and the west are.

The Indians and hunters who catch animals for their fur live a great deal in the forests. Often there are no roads to guide them. Sometimes it is very cloudy, and they cannot see the sun. They are said to have a very curious way of finding out where the north is.

Moss grows best in shady places, and generally grows thickest on the north side of the trunks of trees, because the sun does not shine much on that side.

The hunters and Indians, therefore, look to see which side of the tree is covered with moss. They know that the mossy side is the north side. Moss is to them as good a friend as the compass is to the sailor.

At night it is easy to find one's way if the stars can be seen. There is one star which is always in the north. We can see it in the picture.

The single star is called the North Star because it is always in the north. We find it by the help of two bright stars in the Great Dipper. They are called the Pointers.

For Recitation.—What do you mean by direction? What are the chief directions? How can you tell where the east is? Where is the west? Where is the north? Where is the south? What other points of direction are often spoken of? What shows direction better than anything else?

Distance

LESSON III.

DISTANCE.

Preparatory Oral Work.—Have pupils, using twelve-inch rulers, draw lines on the board one foot long; two feet long; one yard long, etc. Draw in various directions lines of different lengths, and ask how long each is. Test the correctness of answers with the ruler. Have children draw lines by guess, and test the accuracy of their guesses.

Have the pupils learn what two places in the neighborhood are about one mile apart; in a city, how many blocks there are to a mile. Have pupils tell about their walks or drives, noting distance and time.

1. What we Mean by Distance.—It is not easy to find a place if we know only in what direction it is from us. We should know also how far away it is, or the distance we shall have to go before reaching it.

If we know only that the house of a friend is east of ours, we cannot tell just where it is. But if we know that it is east of ours, and also how far east, then we can tell very nearly where it is.

The honey-bee knows exactly in what direction it must fly when it wishes to go home, and it knows also the distance, or just how far it must fly.

The mother bird that has her little ones in a nest in the tree, knows not only in what direction she must fly, but how far she must fly, so as to get back to the nest.

The bees and birds all know direction and distance by instinct. We have to learn.

We have already seen how we learn about direction. Let us now see how we learn about distance.

View of a broad valley in Maryland. Notice how distance affects the size and appearance of objects.

Very often we do not need to be exact. It is enough to know that a place is "very far off" or "very near." But sometimes we must know just what the distance is. To find out this we measure.

How do we measure? We measure with foot rules and yard sticks and tape measures. You know how long an inch is. Twelve inches are called a foot. Three feet make the measure that we call a yard. Five and a half yards make what we call a rod.

With these measures we can easily find out short distances We can see how long the schoolroom is, or how long and how wide the playground is.

But for very long distances we must have very long measures; and so we call the distance of 320 rods one mile. We can walk a mile in about twenty-five or thirty minutes. So if it takes us half an hour to walk from our home to school, the distance is about a mile.

For Recitation.—If we wish to go to any place, what should we know besides the direction? What is meant by the distance between two places? How do you measure short distances?

Pupils should be required to memorize the following table:

12 inches are one foot. | 5½ yards are one rod.

3 feet " " yard. | 320 rods " " mile.

LESSON IV.

MORE ABOUT DIRECTION AND DISTANCE.

Preparatory Oral Work.—Draw on the board an oblong like the teacher's desk. Let the children place objects on the desk while you put marks on the plan to represent the positions of these objects. Put marks on the plan and have pupils put objects on corresponding places on the desk. Do the same with pupils' own desks.

Draw a plan of the room on the board. Make the top north. Have pupils stand in various places, and mark these places on the plan; then put marks on the plan; and let pupils stand at places in the room corresponding to these marks.

Measure the room with a tape measure, and draw on the board a plan on the scale of an inch to a foot. Have pupils draw on paper to a smaller scale. Measure the school yard and places in the neighborhood. Make plans and maps of these places.

1. Pictures.—We have now been talking and thinking a great deal about direction and distance. In this lesson we will try to understand how they are shown to the eye. To show them to the eye we use what we call plans, or maps. But what are plans, or maps?

We all know what pictures are. Here we see the picture of a schoolroom.

Picture of a city schoolroom.

It almost seems as if we were in it. There are desks and blackboards, pupils, teacher, teacher's table, pictures, etc., all looking just like the things themselves.

Pictures, then, are drawings that show how things look.

2. Plans, or Maps, are different. They are drawings that show where things are. They tell in what direction things are from one another, and how far apart they are.

Here we have a plan of the schoolroom, the picture of which is shown above.

Plan of the schoolroom in the picture.

Let us make a plan of our own schoolroom on the blackboard.

The first thing is to represent the sides. Suppose we measure them. We can see that they cannot be drawn on the blackboard as long as they really are.

So we will let one inch on the blackboard represent one foot. Then we will draw all the sides so many inches long, instead of so many feet long.

Now how shall we show directions in our plan? We cannot show them exactly as they are; but we will call the top of the plan north, the right hand east, the bottom south, and the left hand west.

We have now drawn the schoolroom floor. But there is nothing on it. That will never do. So we will make some little marks that shall show just where the desks and chairs are. Then we shall have a plan, or map, of the schoolroom floor and of the things, upon it.

Our plan is a great deal smaller than the floor really is, but all the parts are made smaller alike, or in proportion. The plan is said to be drawn on a scale of 1 inch to 1 foot, which means that every inch on the plan stands for 1 foot.

Now what does the plan show? It shows just where everything is, in what direction things are from one another, and how far apart they are.

We can see that the door is on the north side of the room, that the teacher's desk is on the west side, and that the windows are on the south. We can see in what direction each pupil is from every other.

Then, again, we can tell how far each thing is from every other. If it is twenty inches on the plan from one boy's desk to the door, you know that that boy has to walk twenty feet to reach the door when he is going home, because every inch stands for one foot.

3. Picture of a Village.—Here is a picture of a village with its streets, its railroad station, its factory, its churches and its homes. Does it not look just like a village? You can see the train coming into the station, and the stream which flows near by. Find three bridges across the stream. Find the farmhouse in the country north of the village.

Picture of a village.

4. Plan, or Map, of a Village.—Here we have a plan, or map, of the same village. It does not look like a village, but, like the plan of the schoolroom, it shows the direction and exact distance of points from each other.

Map of the same village. Find objects shown in the picture.

5. Larger Maps.—Now as we make maps of villages, so we make maps of counties, states, and whole countries. In some maps, as we shall soon learn, half of the earth is shown at once.

The scale of such a map will be very small. An inch may represent more than a thousand miles.

For Recitation.—What do plans, or maps, show? How much land can be shown on a map?

The Earth

LESSON V.

THE EARTH.

Preparatory Oral Work.—Make balls of clay. Stick a hat pin through the center of each, ball, and measure the distance through the balls. Do this from several directions. Ask if the measurements are the same. Should they be? Teach the word diameter.

Cut each ball into halves. What shape is the cut surface of each half? Measure the distance around the edge with a string. Put the halves together and halve again in another plane. Ask if these measurements are the same. Should they be? Teach the words circumference, equator, and poles.

1. Shape of the Earth.—In studying geography we shall learn a great many strange things. One of the strangest things is what we learn about the shape of the earth.

Suppose the earth were flat, and we were to travel on and on in one direction without turning, should we ever come back to the same place from which we started? Of course we should not. If we traveled long enough we should come to the edge of the earth. We should be like an ant walking on a table. If the ant keeps on in one direction all the time, it will reach the edge of the table.

But if the ant walks upon an orange and always goes in the same direction, it will at last come to the place from which it started. This is because the orange is round.

If people travel on the earth, always keeping in one direction, like the ant on the orange, they never come to any edge. They arrive at last at the place from which they set out. So we know that the earth is round like a ball or an orange.

Ships seen from the shore.

When the author of this little book was a boy he started from New York in a ship, and traveled for many months, never turning back, until at last he came to New York again. He had gone round the earth. The earth does not seem round to us. The fields and the village, or the city where we live, may be flat. Some places look as flat as a floor. But still the earth is round.

Can we suppose that the little ant on the orange thinks that the orange is round? If he thinks at all, he must think it is flat.

We are so large that we see a large part of the orange at once. Hence we can see that it is round. The small ant sees only a small part of the orange at once, and that part seems flat.

If we could stand off and look at the earth as we look at the orange, then we should see that it is round. But we cannot get far enough from the earth to do this; we can see only a very small part of it at one time. This is the reason that it seems flat to us.

The Earth as it would look if we could see it from the moon.

2. Size of the Earth.—Suppose a carrier dove should fly round the earth. A swift carrier dove can fly 100 miles an hour. If it was to fly at that rate, without ever stopping, it would be more than ten days in going round the earth.

If a man could walk round the earth, and went 50 miles a day, the trip would take him more than sixteen months.

What a big ball the earth must be! We know about how much a mile is. The distance round the earth is 25,000 miles. This distance is called the circumference of the earth. The distance through the earth is about 8,000 miles. This distance is called the diameter of the earth.

The distance through the earth is a little greater at the equator than it is at the poles. If you press an orange between your thumb and linger and flatten it a little, it will have about the same shape as the earth.

For Recitation.—What is the shape of the earth? How do we know this? Why does the earth seem flat to us? How far is it round the earth? How far is it through the earth?

LESSON VI.

THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH.

Preparatory Oral Work.—Teach the word surface. Touch the surface of the globe; of the desk. Teach that one is a flat and the other a curved surface. In the same way teach the word interior.

Show the pupils how the waves dashing against the rocky coast might tear it down, and by pounding the torn pieces and rolling them about might grind them down to pebbles and sand.

1. Land.—The outside of the earth is called its surface. One part of the surface is solid, or hard. This is called the land.

We live on the land, and build our houses and towns and cities upon it. Trees and other plants grow on the land, and animals live on it.

2. Water.—But there is a large part of the surface of the earth which is water. Most of us have seen a pond, and we all know what a pond is. Now suppose a pond were made ever so large, hundreds and thousands of miles across, instead of a few yards. There is a pond as large as that. It is called the sea.

How large do you think it is? A boat can sail across a small pond in a few minutes, but it takes a sailing vessel about fifty days to sail across some parts of the sea. Think of being on the water seven weeks without seeing land!

We can see in the picture above that the water surface is very much larger than the land surface. There is nearly three times as much water as land.

Under the water is land which is much like other land except that the water covers it. Strange plants grow on it. There are no daisies or buttercups, but there are seaweeds of beautiful colors, purple and yellow and red and green. The fishes, you see, have their gardens as well as we.

Photograph by Hegger, N.Y.

A view of Cornwall, England, where the land and the sea meet. The sea washes against the cliff and wears it away.

It may seem strange that the fishes should have so much more room to live in than man and the other animals. But we shall see, when we know more about geography, that man and the lower animals that are on the land could not live at all if it were not for the great sea. The plants would have no rain. They would all die, and there would be nothing for us and the lower animals to eat.

3. Air.—Over all the land surface and over all the water surface is something that we call air. It is just as much a part of the earth as the land and the water. We live in this air much as fish live in the water. It is all around us, but it is so thin and clear that we cannot see it. When we look up, the blue that we see and call the sky, is really air.

When air moves past us wo can feel it, and then we call it a breeze or wind.

The clouds are floating in the air. Anything that is as light as air will float in it. A balloon rises and floats because it is filled with something lighter than air.

Below the land surface and below the water that fills the low places in the land, is rock, and we believe that far down in the center this rock is red-hot all the time; but the center is so far below the surface that no one has ever been able to get far enough into the earth to find out whether our belief is correct.

For Recitation.—Into what is the surface of the earth divided? How much of the earth's surface is land? How much of it is water?

The Land

LESSON VII.

THE LAND.

Preparatory Oral Work.—On a sand board, or big table, or tin tray, painted blue, if possible, to represent water, make roughly, with wet sand, shapes representing the land forms. Develop therefrom the meanings of the terms coast, continent, island, peninsula, isthmus, cape, and teach the terms. Who has seen an island? a peninsula? a cape? an isthmus?

Turn to the relief map on page 35. Find a peninsula; an isthmus; an island.

1. We have now learned that the surface of the earth is partly land and partly water.

Both the land and the water are divided into parts of bodies of different sizes and shapes.

2. Continents.—The largest parts or divisions of the land are called con'-ti-nents. Notice two of them in the picture on page 9.

We can travel on them for hundreds and even thousands of miles without ever reaching the sea. It takes a railway train nearly a week to go across the continent on which we live. 3. Islands.—Parts of the land smaller than continents, and entirely surrounded by water, are called islands.

All the islands have never been counted, because there are so many. Some of them are very large, others so small that they look on the map like specks. Some contain a great many inhabitants; others have no one living upon them.

Perhaps the most curious of all are the Coral Islands. Most of them are found in the Pacific ocean. We shall learn more about these islands by and by.