NOTES AND COMMENT 



At the Princeton Meeting of the Association of American Geog- 

 raphers, in December 1913, a paper was presented by Mr. W. L. G. 

 Joerg in which he reviewed all of the leading attempts at a subdivision 

 of North America into natural regions. In the recently published text 

 of this paper (Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 

 Vol. 4, p. 55) the author shows that the principal criteria for such 

 maps have been taken from physiography, orography, climate, and 

 the distribution of plants and animals. He has brought together 

 a series of 21 maps showing the proposals of as many workers for the 

 subdivision of North America, or of the United States, on the basis of 

 some one of these criteria, or on a composite basis of all of them. Mr. 

 Joerg adds a map of his own, which he speaks of as "selective" and "ten- 

 tative," showing the natural areas of North America. 



Such a tremendous diversity is exhibited by the maps collected by 

 Mr. Joerg that it is almost surprising that the members of the Associa- 

 tion had the courage, at their last meeting in Chicago, to conduct a 

 round-table conference on the subject of the proper methods and 

 criteria for the delineation of physiographic provinces in the United 

 States. There is at least some hope of achieving acceptable maps 

 of physiographic or climatic provinces, provided it is possible to unify 

 or compromise the divergent view-points of all the physiographers or 

 climatologists. Students of regional problems in botany and zoology 

 will have considerable use for such maps, provided they are based 

 strictly on the features which they are supposed to depict. A map 

 of climatic provinces like that of Koppen, for example, which is based 

 to a great extent on vegetational criteria, can be of little use to a plant 

 geographer, unless he enjoys the intellectual exercise of reasoning in 

 a circle. 



The construction of a map of natural regions is a much more diffi- 

 cult undertaking, and largely because it is a less definite one. The 

 map proposed by Mr. Joerg is a very careful piece of work and 

 might serve fairly well as a map of climatic, physiographic, or biotic 

 regions. In fact it differentiates climate better than the purely climatic 

 maps of Supan and of Hult, and it makes a better map of vegetational 

 areas than that of Hardy, which is based on vegetation alone. 



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