as the student can see clear pictures, through them, pictures painted in unfading colours; and the child sees in them nothing but paper and clay. So Professor Geddes tries to make it possible for children to see the world by means of the panorama. He strove to get this realistic kind of picture for the children of Dunfermline. Other geographers engage the finest painters of the age to paint pictures of different scenes. The Libyan desert and its burning sands—the Rockies, a revelation in azure, the great prairies and savannahs, the Arctic summer, and the warm splendour of the southern night, are all rendered on canvas by realistic painters, working with the aim of making these things visible to non-travelling children. If the teacher uses a book, it is a book full of pictures—a book written too by literary artists, each describing one place that he knows and has lived in. Such geography primers in Russia bear the names of Tolstoy, Gorky, and other master painters in words, every one of whom has lent his aid to the primary school teacher.[1]
Tolstoy himself gives us a picture of his evening class. "Come to the school in the twilight; there is
- ↑ Among school suppliers Holzel of Vienna sends out sets of oleographs—copies of pictures painted for schools by the greatest landscape painters—the larger set of twenty-eight copies costing about £9, the smaller reproductions only 9s.
