ection.

[11] Darwin. V. Botanic Garden.

CHAPTER XIV.

ON GEOGRAPHY AND CHRONOLOGY.

The usual manner of teaching Geography and Chronology, may, perhaps,
be necessary in public seminaries, where a number of boys are to learn
the same thing at the same time; but what is learned in this manner,
is not permanent; something besides merely committing names and dates
to the memory, is requisite to make a useful impression upon the
memory. For the truth of this observation, an appeal is made to the
reader. Let him recollect, whether the Geography and Chronology which
he learned whilst a boy, are what he now remembers--Whether he has not
obtained his present knowledge from other sources than the tasks of
early years. When business, or conversation, calls upon us to furnish
facts accurate as to place and time, we retrace our former
heterogeneous acquirements, and select those circumstances which are
connected with our present pursuit, and thus we form, as it were, a
nucleus round which other facts insensibly arrange themselves. Perhaps
no two men in the world, who are well versed in these studies, connect
their knowledge in the same manner. Relation to some particular
country, some favourite history, some distinguished person, forms the
connection which guides our recollection, and which arranges our
increasing nomenclature. By attending to what passes in our own minds,
we may learn an effectual method of teaching without pain, and without
any extraordinary burden to the memory, all that is useful of these
sciences. The details of history should be marked by a few
chronological aeras, and by a few general ideas of geography. When
these have been once completely associated in the mind, there is
little danger of their being ever disunited: the sight of any country
will recall its history, and even from representations in a map, or on
the globe, when the mind is wakened by any recent event, a long train
of concomitant ideas will recur.

The use of technical helps to the memory, has been condemned by many,
and certainly, when they are employed as artifices to supply the place
of real knowledge, they are contemptible; but when they are used as
indexes to facts that have been really collected in the mind; when
they serve to arrange the materials of knowledge in appropriate
classes, and to give a sure and rapid clue to recollection, they are
of real advantage to the understanding. Indeed, they are now so
common, that pr