128 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1440 



The Art of Geographical Description 

 The staff of a Graduate School of Geogi-aphy 

 ■will have to take their share not onh' in detin- 

 ing and cultivating a scientific method of geo- 

 graphical investigation ; they must also develop 

 an artful method of geographical description. 

 While a geographer is in the field, the suhjeet 

 of his investigation and his method of attack- 

 ing it will occupy his mind. When he returns 

 home the statement of his results in form for 

 their communication to others will occupy his 

 mind. In both occasions his mind will be fully 

 occupied, however great its capacity. The 

 science of investigation is somewhat technical; 

 I can not discuss it here; but the art of pre- 

 sentation may be briefly considered. Many 

 results of esploration may be best presented on 

 maps; some results may be presented in photo- 

 graphs, sketches and diagrams; some in models 

 and some in statistical tables; but the great 

 body of results is best presented in words. 

 Now while the geographical facts coexist sim- 

 ultaneously in their regions, they can not be 

 presented simultaneously in a report upon a 

 region; a written report must present them 

 consecutively, word after word, line after line, 

 page after page. It may surprise you to leam, 

 but I believe it to be true, that the future staff 

 of geographers in the Clark Graduate School of 

 Geographj' will have a very serious problem 

 to solve before they can establish, even in gen- 

 eral terms a standard method of presenting 

 or reporting upon the results of their explora- 

 tions. 



By such a standard method I do not mean 

 anything rigid and inflexible: but a method 

 that will give the reader of a report true and 

 vivid concept of the region described. For 

 just as accuracy is the essential object in the 

 science of investigation, so intelligibility is the 

 essential object in the art of presentation, and 

 one of these high qualities is about as difficult 

 of acquisition as the other. It is unfortunately 

 true that certain leading geographers are 

 stronger in the possession of their science with- 

 in themselves than in its presentation to others. 

 It would almost seem, from their preference for 

 possession and their indifference to the fine 

 art of presentation, that they hold possession 

 to be in geography, as it is in the law, nine 



points of the whole ten; but that is an un- 

 scholarly attitude. Of what avail is knowledge 

 if it is not clearly set forth; of what value is 

 an obscure presentation in which art least a 

 part of the truth is lost. I trust that no pro- 

 fessor or student of geography in Clark Uni- 

 versity will be indifferent in this matter; for 

 accuracy in investigation and intelligibility in 

 presentation are correlated essentials, and hence 

 lack of intelligibility in presentation is too 

 often an accompaniment of a sort of careless- 

 ness that is incompatible with accuracy in 

 investigation. 



Errors to be avoided 



How is the art of geographical presentation 

 to be acquired and communicated? Perhaps 

 you may imagine that articles and reports of 

 standard excellence in the presentation of prob- 

 lems in regional geography already abound, 

 and that all that is needed is to adopt and 

 copy their method; but such is by no means 

 the case. In the fii'st place a large number of 

 articles and books commonly classed as geo- 

 graphical are chiefly narratives in which the 

 narrator, often an untrained traveller, gives a 

 leading position to his personal experiences, 

 altho they are very subjective matters. Narra- 

 tive presentation is certainly entertaining to 

 the general reader, and it is not to be dispensed 

 witli ; but it falls far short of satisfying the ob- 

 jective demands of scientific geography, just 

 as the narrative of a plant collector would faU 

 short of the demands of scientific botany. 



In the second place many geographical arti- 

 cles and reports, altho they are presented in a 

 descriptive instead of in a narrative form, 

 nevertheless treat problems of less extent than 

 those of full-fledged regional geography; they 

 are useful contributions to the geographical 

 science, but they fail to reach a complete re- 

 gional treatment. In the third place, many 

 articles that are in part regional are also in 

 part analytical, in that they attempt to demon- 

 strate an explanation for some fact or phe- 

 nomenon that they describe; indeed, such arti- 

 cles are often largely geological, in that they 

 turn attention away from the facts of today 

 and direct it to the past conditions and pro- 

 cesses by which the present-day facts have been 

 brought about. Articles of this kind are in- 



