Juny 26, 1918] 
planatory method of geographical description, 
I want none of it!” 
It is not only geological terms, but geo- 
logical habits of thought, that should be 
avoided in geographical descriptions. For ex- 
ample, an account of a district in northern 
Africa, published in La Géographie, the jour- 
nal of the Geographical Society of Paris, six 
or more years ago, included the statement that 
a certain locality is traversed by a fault, which 
brings two unlike geological formations to- 
gether; but nothing was said as to the physio- 
graphic expression of the faulted structure. 
The reason for this silence was, plainly 
enough, that the author was a geologist who 
did not distinguish between the geological and 
the physiographic treatment of faults; he was 
interested in internal structure, as a geologist 
must be but he did not extend his interest, as 
a geographer should, to the point of showing 
how internal structure, acted upon by exterior 
forces for a shorter or longer period of time, 
influence surface form. 
Many more examples of the geological habit 
of thought dominating geographical descrip- 
tions are to be found in the employment of the 
past tense of verbs in the treatment of exist- 
ing physiographic features. The past tense 
is eminently fitting in those excellent summar- 
ies of physiographic development that are pre- 
sented in the Geologie Folios of the U. S. 
Geological Survey, for these summaries are 
properly enough nothing more than the his- 
toric geology of land forms, in which the past 
tense is fitting. But when physiographic fea- 
tures are presented in geographical descrip- 
tions, their treatment should be so devised as 
to leave the reader vividly impressed with 
actual land forms as they exist to-day; 
and nothing is so helpful to this end as the 
use of verbs in the present tense. In the 
analytical treatment of physiographic prob- 
lems, the use of the past tense is unavoidable; 
and it is for this very reason that analysis 
should be followed by description, if the best 
geographical flavor is to be given. It is well 
enough to say, in the course of analytical in- 
vestigation, that “the Rahway River was not 
SCIENCE 83 
captured by the Passaic until it had cut a 
passage across the trap sheets” ; but if noth- 
ing more is said the reader of such a passage 
will likely enough be left in the contemplation 
of the speculative past instead of being 
brought to realize the actual present. 
There is some discussion at present in prog- 
ress regarding “emergency problems” in edu- 
cation. Geography will, it is to be hoped, 
have a proper share of consideration. One of 
its emergency needs to-day is single-minded 
devotion to its development on the part of its 
devotees. If there be such a science as geog- 
raphy, let those who pursue it beware of the 
danger of falling into geological habits of 
thought on the one side, and into historical 
habits of thought on the other; let them bring 
into geography every relevant geological and 
historical item as freely as geographical items 
have been carried into geology and history; 
but let them at the same time conceive and 
phrase all the items and ideas that are per- 
tinent to their subject in such a way as to 
give every item and idea a truly geographical 
flavor, and let them avoid the meretricious 
method of adding to their geographical ar- 
ticles matter that really belongs elsewhere in 
the hope of making them more “ interesting.” 
If geography can not stand on its own merits, 
let it fall. 
The merit of Cotton’s study is, to my read- 
ing, that he has striven with praiseworthy 
single-mindedness to give his subject a purely 
geographical treatment; his article is there- 
fore a valuable contribution to geographical 
discipline. He sufficiently indicated the phys- 
iographic date of the faulting by which his 
Block mountains were formed by stating the 
stage of post-faulting dissection that they now 
exhibit. He might easily have added geo- 
logical formation dates for the edification of 
geologists, petrographical terms for the pleas- 
ure of petrographers, and lists of fossils for 
the benefit of paleontologists, for he is a com- 
petent student in all these subjects. He con- 
sciously sacrificed these unessential elements 
in his successful effort to make a contribution 
to geography alone, as a conscious experiment 
