omantic imagination. It shares in the wonder and glory that
attach to adventure, travel, and exploration. The variety of peoples and
environments, their contrast with familiar scenes, furnishes infinite
stimulation. The mind is moved from the monotony of the customary.
And while local or home geography is the natural starting point in
the reconstructive development of the natural environment, it is an
intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown, not an end
in itself. When not treated as a basis for getting at the large world
beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as deadly as do object
lessons which simply summarize the properties of familiar objects. The
reason is the same. The imagination is not fed, but is held down to
recapitulating, cataloguing, and refining what is already known. But
when the familiar fences that mark the limits of the village proprietors
are signs that introduce an understanding of the boundaries of great
nations, even fences are lighted with meaning. Sunlight, air, running
water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil officers
and their duties--all these things are found in the local environment.
Treated as if their meaning began and ended in those confines, they are
curious facts to be laboriously learned. As instruments for extending
the limits of experience, bringing within its scope peoples and things
otherwise strange and unknown, they are transfigured by the use to which
they are put. Sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political relations
come from afar and lead the thoughts afar. To follow their course is to
enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional information, but by
remaking the meaning of what was previously a matter of course.

The same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of geographical
study which tend to become specialized and separate. Mathematical
or astronomical, physiographic, topographic, political, commercial,
geography, all make their claims. How are they to be adjusted? By an
external compromise that crowds in so much of each? No other method is
to be found unless it be constantly borne in mind that the educational
center of gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject.
From this center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is
needed to help appreciate the significance of human activities and
relations. The differences of civilization in cold and tropical regions,
the special inventions, indus