82 ; SCIENCE 
local examples in the systematic pages and of 
some explanatory discussion in the regional 
pages results in blending the two styles of 
treatment undesirably. I venture to make the 
further suggestion that a one-page regional 
summary at the end of the article would have 
made its results more readily available to 
geographers in general, and would have at the 
same time serve as a disciplinary test of the 
success of all the preceding pages; for geo- 
graphically speaking, it is in order to prepare 
such a concise explanatory description of ex- 
isting forms that the analytical study of their 
origin and the systematization of the results 
of analysis are attempted. 
The protests that I haye made on various 
occasions, when urging that geographers 
should develop a scientific discipline of their 
own, have not been primarily directed against 
the inclusion of geological terms and items, as 
such, in a geographical article, for if a geog- 
rapher wishes to introduce such extraneous 
matters, not for the benefit of the other geog- 
raphers whom he is addressing, but for the 
satisfaction of such geologists as may honor 
him by their attention, he is surely free to do 
so although it is difficult to see how he is 
thereby cultivating or developing geographical 
science. My protests have been chiefly di- 
rected against the use of geological terms in 
geographical descriptions, where geographical 
terms are more serviceable. 
For example, a recent geographical lecture 
on northeastern France, published in the 
Scottish Geographical Magazine, described the 
“ escarpments,” which dominate the relief of 
the region between Paris and the Vosges, by 
the time-names of the geological formations 
which maintain them. Surely a directly geo- 
eraphical statement of the composition, thick- 
ness and attitude of the cuesta-making series 
of strata would have been more helpful, for 
it is geographically immaterial when the strata 
were deposited: but although the lecturer is 
primarily a geographer, a geological terminol- 
ogy was employed. It is further significant 
of the immature condition of geography that 
this well-informed lecturer, addressing a geo- 
graphical audience in Great Britain on the 
[N. 8. Von. XLVIII. No. 1280 
geography of the neighboring country of 
France, found it advisable to imtroduce an 
elementary explanation of physiographic fea- 
tures so simple as cuestas, as if they were 
unknown both in kind and in place, and yet 
did not feel it necessary to give explanatory 
definitions of technical geological terms such 
as Triassic and Jurassic! If a geographical 
audience is not familiar with the physio- 
graphic features that are ordinarily associated 
with a gently dipping series of harder and 
softer stratified formation, let them be ex- 
plained by all means; but let the explanation 
be in pertinent geographical terms, and not 
in terms so irrelevant as the geological dates 
when the formations were laid down. 
Several years ago the London Geographical 
Journal published an account of a district in 
central England in an article which pur- 
ported to be geographical—otherwise it could 
hardly have found a place in that journal— 
and which apparently aimed to represent mod- 
ern methods in scientific geography, but which 
must certainly have worked to the disadvan- 
tage of true geographical discipline; for its 
introductory pages abounded in remotely ir- 
relevant geological speculations presented in 
technical geological parlance, and some of 
its later pages were occupied with painstaking 
enumerations of plant species, doubtless botan- 
ically correct, but not helpful geographically 
because they did not enable the reader, even 
if he were as expert a botanist as the writer, 
to make a correct mental picture of the plant 
assemblages by which the land forms are 
covered. The direct description of the land- 
scape, the prime responsibility of a geo- 
graphical essay, was much less thorough than 
the geological speculations or the botanical 
enumerations. Many a British geographer of 
the old school must have been confirmed, on 
reading this article, in his disinclination to 
exchange the empirical method of geograph- 
ical description, with which he had been fa- 
miliar from boyhood for the more modern ex- 
planatory method; for he would have ex- 
claimed: “If these pages, with their irrelevant 
geological hypotheses and their detailed lists 
of botanical species illustrate the modern ex- 
