Caleb George Cash

Caleb George Cash (1857–1916), honorary fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (FRSGS), was a geographer, passionate mountaineer, and music and geography teacher, known for his work on preserving the maps of medieval Scotland made by Timothy Pont (c.1560–c.1627), which formed the basis for the Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, and for organizing and publishing a bibliography compiled by Arthur Mitchell throughout Mitchell's life.

Cash was born in poverty, in a working class family living in Ladywood, Birmingham, in June 1857.

He taught school in Sheffield, and there met Alice Octavia Randell; they married in July 1881 and in 1886 moved to Scotland.

For 30 years, he taught music and geography at the Edinburgh Academy,[2] and spent his summers in Aviemore, then a popular holiday resort which gave access to the Cairngorms.

[5] In an article in The Geographical Teacher in 1904, Cash related one of his ideas for teaching geography: drawing a panorama of the landscape viewed from a point, including all visible mountain peaks, crags, and skylines, and recording angular measurements between them taken with a protractor.

[7] Cash edited books on geography for young readers, including Cook's Voyages and The Story of the North-West Passage.

[2] He also had an interest in archeology (including menhirs, cairns, and hill forts; he documented these and published on them in, for instance, the journal of the Cairngorm's Club.

[9] Mitchell had simply jotted down notes on scraps of paper torn from unused parts of letters over the years and stored them in what Cash described as a "chaotic multitude" of cardboard boxes.

[7] Cash gave a signed copy of it to the library of the RSGS in June 1917, and as of the 21st century the National Library of Scotland has two copies, one on a reference shelf and one in a reading room, the latter of which, librarians there told MacInnes, they use all of the time in order to answer questions from the general public.