Later immigrants formed their centres either in the neighbourhood of these roads, as the Saxons, who often formed villages at a point where the road crossed a stream, as Hertford and Stamford on the Ermine Street, or on sheltered bays and navigable streams, like the Norse and Danes, whose towns and villages, ending in “ley,” “thorpe,” “wic,” are never found except where there is a spring or other natural water supply.
As the various races inhabiting England became amalgamated, and the land was cleared, there was a tendency for towns and villages to spring up over such districts as the Weald, the eastern counties, the central plain and broad river valleys. But there was no great concentration of population save in the south-east, where the neighbourhood of the continent called into existence the Cinque Ports, and where iron smelting was carried on by using the wood of the Wealden forests.
As the Cinque Ports declined, the growth of the navy and the increase of fisheries and trade with the continent increased the size of other ports, and the growing importance of the woollen trade called into existence the large Norfolk towns, which flourished until vexatious guild regulations induced many workers to leave the towns, and form industrial villages as Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield. Settlements of foreigners, as the French silk weavers at Spitalfields, also formed a nucleus for other industries.
At this point the children might be shown a geological map of England, and also a map in which all those districts with a population of more than 500 to the square mile are coloured red; they would notice that almost all these red patches correspond with coal fields, and be told that the period of beginning to work many of these coal fields, corresponded with that at which America was being opened up; that consequently such ports as Liverpool and Bristol on the west coast became identified with the importing of cotton and sugar, and that towns engaged in these industries sprang up in the neighbourhood of these ports.
The use of steam power in various manufactures still further attracted the cotton and woollen industries to the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the working of iron, found in the neighbourhood of coal, accounts for many other centres of population.
Another map may now be shown with the various manufacturing towns marked, and attention called to the physical features which have caused the location of the industry at that spot, as the presence of water power, the possibility of water carriage, the neighbourhood of a port, the presence of hard water used in beer-making, as at Burton.
When the internal growth of England has been considered, a lesson should be given on her commercial supremacy, and the factors which have determined it. England’s position in the centre of the great land hemisphere, the climate, the indented character of the coast, and the mineral wealth, should all be touched upon; nor in doing this should points not geographical be omitted, as the needs of a continually increasing population, the founding of colonies by a part of this surplus population, and, above all, the character of the people, upon which alone the greatness of an empire can rest.
PHYSICS.
By Agatha Leonard, B.Sc. (Lond.).
Position of “physics” in scheme of science teaching.As a preliminary to any remarks on the teaching of physics, it will be well to consider the place which the subject should hold in a general scheme of science teaching. It is not the most suitable subject for junior classes; for young children the sciences of botany and zoology which cultivate the observing faculty, while making less demand upon the reasoning powers, are preferable, but for children of thirteen or fourteen a course of elementary physics affords valuable training and arouses great interest. The subject must, of course, be treated on purely experimental and non-mathematical lines, indeed the chief value of physics at this stage is to teach the children the true use and nature of experiment. They will probably begin with the idea that the use of experiments in a lecture is somewhat the same as that of illustrations in a story-book, to render it more entertaining, though they might be dispensed with, and it takes time to make clear to them that experiment is the very groundwork of all science, the careful “questioning of nature” as to what effects follow upon certain causes. These lessons on physics will lay an excellent foundation for a course on physical geography, which may be taken for the next year’s work.