trial and political, of peoples in the
temperate regions, cannot be understood without appeal to the earth as a
member of the solar system. Economic activities deeply influence social
intercourse and political organization on one side, and reflect physical
conditions on the other. The specializations of these topics are for the
specialists; their interaction concerns man as a being whose experience
is social.

To include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced;
verbally, it is. But in educational idea there is but one reality, and
it is pity that in practice we have two names: for the diversity of
names tends to conceal the identity of meaning. Nature and the earth
should be equivalent terms, and so should earth study and nature
study. Everybody knows that nature study has suffered in schools from
scrappiness of subject matter, due to dealing with a large number of
isolated points. The parts of a flower have been studied, for example,
apart from the flower as an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the
plant apart from the soil, air, and light in which and through which it
lives. The result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which attention
is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed imagination.
The lack of interest is so great that it was seriously proposed to
revive animism, to clothe natural facts and events with myths in order
that they might attract and hold the mind. In numberless cases, more or
less silly personifications were resorted to. The method was silly, but
it expressed a real need for a human atmosphere. The facts had been torn
to pieces by being taken out of their context. They no longer belonged
to the earth; they had no abiding place anywhere. To compensate,
recourse was had to artificial and sentimental associations. The real
remedy is to make nature study a study of nature, not of fragments made
meaningless through complete removal from the situations in which they
are produced and in which they operate. When nature is treated as a
whole, like the earth in its relations, its phenomena fall into their
natural relations of sympathy and association with human life, and
artificial substitutes are not needed.

3. History and Present Social Life. The segregation which kills the
vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social
life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly
gone and done with, there would be only one reaso