Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Instruction (Volume 16) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1846. Excerpt: ... LECTURE IX. ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY. By GEORGE S. HILLARD. Geography, as commonly taught, is one of the dryest and least profitable of studies. It is a mere bead-roll of names, dates and distances. It has no animating principle of life. It is the skeleton and not the living body; the hortus siccus of dried plants and not the garden. But viewed in connection with man, and the history of man, it becomes a pursuit alike attractive and instructing. The breath of life is thus breathed into it. Without it, history itself can be but imperfectly understood. To comprehend the biography of nations, we must know the physical structure and properties of the regions they occupy, their relations to the sea, the character and direction of their streams of water, the proportion in which the surface of the soil is distributed into mountains, plains and valleys, and their stores of mineral wealth. The most superficial acquaintance with history reveals to us great inequalities in the fortune and condition of the various members of the human family. The countries, in which one would wish to have been born, are few, and of limited extent. The brutal savage and the half civilized barbarian form the rule, and cultivated and intelligent man, the exception. All the moral and intellectual wealth of the world has been gathered from a small portion of the earth's surface. There are vast regions--tracts which the eagle's wing cannot measure without flagging--with whose people, history has as little to do, as with the squabbles of a rookery or the dynasties of a bee-hive. Among civilized and historical nations, too, we perceive peculiar characteristics which are modified, but not essentially altered by the lapse of time. Some are agricultural, some pastoral, so...