quette, but also by most valuable maps. Thus we read of Father Martini in Baron von Richthofen's work on China: "Father Martini is the best geographer of all the missioners. By his great work, Novus Atlas Sinensis, the best and most complete description which we possess of China, he has become the Father of Chinese geography." The first maps of North Mexico, Arizona and Lower California, were prepared by four German Jesuits, among them the famous Father Kino (his German name was Kühn).[1]
These few details taken from a mass of similar facts, show what interest the Jesuits took in geography, and even if we had no positive proof we would have to conjecture that they did not neglect its study in their schools. But the positive proofs abundantly show that another charge against the Jesuit colleges of former centuries is a sheer calumny.
Owing to the importance of Latin as the universal language of the educated world, less attention was devoted to the study of the mother-tongue. In this regard the schools of the Jesuits did not differ from those of the Protestants. However, at no time was the mother-tongue entirely neglected; and gradually it received more and more consideration. Thus, in France, rules for writing French verses appear in the dictated "courses of rhetoric" in 1663.[2] About 1600, the Bohemian Jesuits asked and received permission to open a private "academy" for the study of the Czech language.[3] As early as 1560 Father Jerome
