1902.] DAVIS — SYSTEMATIC GEOGRAPHY. 237 



facts with which it is concerned. The classifications commonly 

 employed are too often inconsistent, incomplete and immature — 

 inconsistent in their different parts even as to the larger principles 

 upon which their subdivisions are based ; incomplete in not 

 including nearly all the categories of facts which properly belong 

 under geography ; and immature in making too often only a small 

 advance over the method and terminology of school days. The 

 narrow flood-plain scrolls, such as are shown in the figure above, 

 and such as exist in remarkably perfect development in the valley 

 of the North Branch of the Susquehanna, would according to the 

 methods of geographical description and classification usually 

 current be given no sufficient statement as to their form, no 

 adequate explanation as to their origin, no appropriate discussion 

 as to their correlation with adjacent features-, and no systematic 

 treatment as to their share in constituting the physical environment 

 of their organic inhabitants. Yet the flood-plain scrolls deserve 

 due consideration in all these respects from any one who would 

 clearly portray the geography of their district. Lack of consid- 

 eration is not due to any serious difficulty that inheres in the 

 systematic treatment here suggested, but simply to the habitually 

 unsystematic character of geographical study. 



It is the same with the organic items of the broad subject of 

 geography. A farm or a village, a thicket or an ant-hill, a city on 

 a bay or a road over a mountain range is too often mentioned as if 

 it were an isolated and ultimate fact, rather than as if it were a 

 member of a class, exhibiting the peculiar response of certain kinds 

 of organisms to their surroundings. Correlation between the 

 environed organism and the physical environment is coming to be 

 recognized as an essential part of geographical study, yet corre- 

 lation is not habitual in the treatment of the organic division of 

 the subject by those who would wish to be considered geographers ; 

 and as to classification of the correlations, there has as yet been 

 made hardly a beginning. Still it can hardly be doubted that all 

 organic responses are susceptible of a reasonably systematic grouping 

 in relation to one another, and that every example would be better 

 seen and appreciated if it were viewed in association with its 

 fellows. 



2. T/ie Value of Systematic Geography.— It may be urged with 

 much confidence that fuller attention to such items as narrow flood- 

 plain scrolls, or to any one of the innumerable organic examples 



