【電子書】給中小學生的世界地理【西方家庭必備，經典英語學習版】

前言INTRODUCTION

(If you are under fifteen years, eight months and three days old DON’T READ THIS)

This book is for the child who:
thinks heaven is in the sky and
hell is under the ground;
has never heard of London or Paris and
thinks a Dane is a kind of dog.

It is to give a traveler’s view of the World—but not a commercial traveler’s view.

It is to show the child what is beyond the horizon, from “Kalamazoo to Timbuktu.”

It is to show him not only “the Seven Wonders of the World” but the seventy times Seven Wonders of the World.

When-I-was-a-boy in New England we had for Thanksgiving six kinds of pie: apple, peach, cranberry, custard, mince, and pumpkin, but I was allowed to have only two kinds and I never could make a satisfactory choice. I have had the same difficulty in selecting geographical places and subjects to tell about. There are too many “most important” places in the World to be included in this first survey, and there will inevitably be those readers who will wonder why certain countries and certain places have been omitted, especially the place where the reader may live.

To me, as a child, geography was a bugbear of repellent names—Climate and Commerce, Manufactures and Industries, and PRODUCTS, PRODUCTS, PRODUCTS. It seemed that the chief products of every place in the World were corn, wheat, barley, rye; or rye, barley, wheat, corn; or barley, corn, rye, wheat. In my geography modern Greece had but a paragraph—because, I suppose, it did not produce wheat, corn, barley, rye. Geography was a “stomach” geography; the “head” and “heart” were left out.

I loved the geography pictures and maps but hated the text. Except for an occasional descriptive or narrative paragraph the text was wholly unreadable—a confused jumble of headings and sub-headings and sub-sub-headings: HOME WORK, NOTES, MAP STUDIES, Suggestions to Teachers, HELPS, Directions, Questions, REVIEWS, PROBLEMS, Exercises, Recitations, LESSONS, PICTURE STUDIES, etc., etc., etc.

The World was an orange when I went to school, and there were only three things I can remember that I ever learned “for sure”—that the Dutch children wore wooden shoes, the Eskimos lived in snow houses, and the Chinese ate with chopsticks.

We had a question and answer catechism which we learned as we did the multiplication tables. The teacher read from her book:

Q. “What is the condition of the people of the United States?” and a thirteen-year-old boy in the next seat answered glibly: A. “They are poor and ignorant and live in miserable huts.” At which astounding statement the teacher unemotionally remarked, “No, that’s the answer to the next question, ‘What is the condition of the Eskimos?’ ”

When my turn came to teach geography to beginners nine years of age, I found the available textbooks either too commercial and industrial, on the one hand, or too puerile and inconsequential, on the other. Statistics and abstractions were entirely beyond the ken of the child of nine, and random stories of children in other countries had little value as geography.

As I had been a traveler for many years, had visited most of the countries of the Globe, and in actual mileage had been five times the distance around the World, I thought I would write a geography myself. Vain conceit! A class would listen with considerable attention to my extemporaneous travel talks, so I had a stenographer take down these talks verbatim. But when I read these notes of the same talk to another class, then it was that I discovered a book may be good—until it is written. So I