And in order to study what was called Political Geography, a vast mass of materials was converted into a stiff, ritualistic frame-work, in the effort to impose some system and imaginal completeness on it, and not in order to grasp facts and truths in their mutual relations and inward life; they were merely arranged for convenient reference and for available use in the departments of military science, politics, statistics, and history; a method which is plainly our inheritance from the Middle Ages, and which bears the marks of those days. Thus from this arbitrary arrangement, made without reference to any indwelling necessity, sprang the three groups with which we are familiar: Chronography and Topography forming the first, Ethnography and Anthropology the second, and Statistics and History the third, or Political Geography. From these three groups our ordinary text-books compile their usual aggregate of facts, and each becomes after its own pattern a motley in miniature. They contain variable quantities of this triple mass of materials, and follow no law but the demands of the time when they see the light; they favor, like our light literature, the whim of the hour, and are political, military, or commercial, as the public may demand. A systematic exposition of geography is very seldom to be found in them. A harmony of parts, a true harmony, is very rarely attained in their pages. They are at the foundation only arbitrary and unmethodical collections of all facts which are ascertained to exist throughout the earth. They are arranged according to countries, or great natural divisions; but the relation of one great natural division to another, the mutual and immense influence of one country on another, is never mentioned. The description of Europe follows in them to-day the same order in which Strabo set the pattern. The facts are arranged as the pieces of a counterpane, as if every one existed in itself and for itself, and had no connections with others. The setting out of these facts follows the rubrical method of grouping, according to boundary, soil, mountains, rivers, products, and cities. The beginning is usually made with _boundaries_ which are generally most unstable and uncertain, instead of being made with some rudimental fact around which all others arrange themselves as a center. If we compare these geographical treatises with those made in the interest of any other great department, we shall speedily discover that they indicate knowledge rather than science; they form a mere aggregation and index of rich materials, a lexicon rather than a true text-book. And therefore ensues, despite the undenied interest of the subject and its high claims, the mechanical and unfruitful method only too common—the crowding of the memory without judgment, without thought; thence comes it that Geography has taken so low a place among our school studies, worthy only of the youngest of the pupils, and presenting little stimulus even to them.