io8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the end of which time his audience ought to have acquired the gist of 

 what has taken him weeks or months to learn. Evidently then the 

 speaker must present only a selection of his best facts, theories and 

 conclusions, in the most carefully planned order. He must say noth- 

 ing at all about much of the material that he has gathered; he must 

 touch very lightly and briefly on various subordinate items, and he must 

 bring forward only those statements for fuller presentation which bear 

 most significantly on his problem, and which can as far as possible 

 be easily understood and remembered by his hearers. For this purpose 

 he must, of course, before he begins to speak, know what grade of audi- 

 ence he is to address: for however useful the exercise of merely ad- 

 dressing an audience may be to an inexperienced speaker, whether what 

 he says is understood or not, he must remember that an audience which 

 has listened for half an hour or more and learned little, has wasted its 

 time. A courteous consideration of those present, as well as a selfish 

 regard for the opinion they will form of him and his work, should lead 

 the speaker to make every effort to repay them for their time and 

 attention, by making his presentation as intelligible and interesting as 

 possible. He must therefore strive to produce a clear and definite 

 understanding of his results in the mind of each hearer, in such form 

 that a good share of them can be carried away and remembered. Hence 

 it is not only on the ground of a generous consideration for the feel- 

 ings of his audience, but, as above said, also from a selfish interest in 

 his own progress, that he ought now to strive to make himself clearly 

 intelligible. If he does not do this, he will be like an unsociable gold- 

 washer, who, with patient endurance, has worked over a great volume 

 of gravel for the sake of finding a few grains of gold, and who then, 

 instead of having the gold refined and coined in form for current cir- 

 culation among his fellows, keeps it in the comparatively useless form 

 in which he found it; and at the same time complains that the value 

 of his patient work is not recognized. 



In view of all this it is manifestly desirable that a student should 

 give due attention to the presentation of his results, as well as to the 

 methods of investigation by which the results were gained. He will 

 be aided in both these worthy efforts if he recognizes clearly the strik- 

 ing differences between the two processes, and then gives to each proc- 

 ess the attention necessary to its best development. An analysis of 

 the method of investigation, as applied to the study of land forms, here 

 follows. A fuller statement regarding presentation will be given in a 

 second article. 



Analysis of Investigation. — As long as geography was concerned 

 only with the observation and record of visible facts, its methods were 

 relatively simple. They included, as far as land forms are concerned, 

 the determination of latitude and longitude, the measurement of direc- 



