Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 December 1892 — Lessons From Old and New Maps. [ARTICLE]

Lessons From Old and New Maps.

Old teachers are sometimes quite a« impressive and instructive as the new ones. Gray hairs covering a sound brain, that has not forgotten how to work along healthy lines, should always secure a respectful and receptive attention from those willing to learn useful lessons. Sometimes they do; quite as often they do not.

One would scarcely expect to get much suggestive and Valuable information from an old School-Atlas. Whatever it might have been in its fresh, bright youth, its days Of usefulness are supposed to have passed with its youth, after which it was consigned to the grate or the garret. The latter is where recently wc found one of these teachers that had been consigned to dußt and cobwebs and to a supposed oblivion nearly forty years ago, under a conviction that its days of usefulness were over. But they were not over. They will never be over so long as the Atlas-teacher has bodily form. If any one doubts that this little world of ours is swinging on continually to a brighter destiny, let him give special study for an hour to our Western Hemisphere, and especially to our part of it, and to the African continent, as the conditions, civil and religious, of the two at that time are illustrated by the Atlas of forty years ago. Then we knew little of our own country—in fact we had not any, except in name, beyond the western boundary line of Missouri and Arkansas projected north and south. Then we had a \arge number of slave-holding States. Then the country now occupied by the States of Dakota (North and South), Nebraska and Kansas was designated as “The Great American Desert” and was considered worthless, and the “howling wilderness” extended to the Rocky Mountains. What wc have there now we all know. The march of civil and religious institutions from the Mississippi to the Pacific has been sure; the changes it has wrought are wonderful, although we think little of them in our busy lives. Forty years ago very little was known of Africa inside its coast lines beyond the fact that it furnished an inexhaustible supply of negroes—men, women and children—to be captured, transported and sold as slaves. To furnish these for Turks and Arabs, to say nothing of some Christian nations, was supposed to be its only mission. The ignorance about Africa a generation ago is illustrated by the map-makers of that period in what were supposed to be the real courses of the Congo and the Niger. The advance of the Dark Continent during the last forty years is illustrated by the maps of to-day. Yes; the world has moved very rapidly during all these years—and in healthy directions.—[N. Y. Evangelist.