DISCOVERERS AND EXPLORERS
EDWARD R. SHAW
New York University
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY
By EDWARD R. SHAW.
PREFACE.
The practice of beginning the study of geography with the localityin which the pupil lives, in order that his first ideas of geographicalconceptions may be gained from observation directed upon the realconditions existing about him, has been steadily gaining adherenceduring the past few years as a rational method of entering upon thestudy of geography.
After the pupil has finished an elementary study of the locality, heis ready to pass to an elementary consideration of the world as a whole,to get his first conception of the planet on which he lives. Hisknowledge of the forms of land and water, his knowledge of rain andwind, of heat and cold, as agents, and of the easily traced effectsresulting from the interaction of these agents, have been acquiredby observation and inference upon conditions actually at hand; inother words, his knowledge has been gained in a presentative manner.
His study of the world, however, must differ largely from this, andmust be effected principally by representation. The globe in relief,therefore, presents to him his basic idea, and all his future studyof the world will but expand and modify this idea, until at length,if the study is properly continued, the idea becomes exceedinglycomplex.
In passing from the geography of the locality to that of the worldas a whole, the pupil is to deal broadly with the land masses and theirgeneral characteristics. The continents and oceans, their relativesituations, form, and size, are then to be treated, but the treatmentis always to be kept easily within the pupil's capabilities—the endbeing merely an elementary world-view.
During the time the pupil is acquiring this elementary knowledge ofthe world as a whole, certain facts of history may be interrelatedwith the geographical study.
According to the plan already suggested, it will be seen that the pupilis carried out from a study of the limited area of land and water abouthim to an idea of the world as a sphere, with its great distributionof land and water. In this transference he soon comes to perceive howsmall a part his hitherto known world forms of the great earth-sphereitself.
Something analogous to this transition on the part of the pupil toa larger view seems to be found in the history of the western nationsof Europe. It is the gradual change in the conception of the worldheld during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the enlargedconception of the world as a sphere which the remarkable discoveriesand explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries broughtabout.
The analogy serves pedagogically to point out an interesting andvaluable interrelation of certain facts of history with certainphases of geographical study.
This book has been prepared for the purpose of affording material forsuch an interrelation. The plan of interrelation is simple. As thestudy of the world as a whole, in the manner already sketched,progresses, the appropriate chapters are read, discussed, andreproduced, and the routes of the various discoverers and