June 17, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



925 



statement to that effect should be made. 

 Normal erosion being understood to be the 

 process engaged in carving the mass to its 

 present form, various details regarding the 

 dissection of the crest, the steepness of the 

 upper slopes, and the ravining of the 

 flanks, may be easily added in the latter 

 part of the description in orderly fashion ; 

 and as easily apprehended. If the ob- 

 server, on seeing the ravines in the eastern 

 flank, hesitates to call them "consequent," 

 because of the vague possibility of some 

 other origin, he may immediately solve 

 this difficulty by calling them ' ' apparently 

 consequent"; and the reader vdll at once 

 catch his meaning, and also his uncer- 

 tainty regarding it. If the observer hesi- 

 tates to assert definitely that the mass was 

 initially a tilted block, he may say it looks 

 "as if" it had been uplifted as a tilted 

 block, provided that that is really his best 

 interpretation of the facts; and then the 

 reader will find in this guarded statement 

 the clue that he needs in order to gain the 

 observer's point of view, to follow the rest 

 of the description, and to form a good 

 mental picture of the landscape. The es- 

 sential principles here are, first, that the 

 reader's mental picture can not be well 

 formed, unless the observer describes what 

 he has seen in terms that are susceptible 

 of definite interpretation; and, second, 

 that the mental picture can not be easily 

 formed, unless the observer presents the 

 results of his observations in a reasonable 

 order. 



Only after a definite description of the 

 landscape has been presented, is it fitting 

 to mention by name subordinate items, 

 such as single villages and individual 

 streams. It is altogether inappropriate to 

 use iinknown local names of villages 

 and streams as a means of locating 

 unknown structures and forms. This 

 is a general principle that is too often 



overlooked. In the absence of all dia- 

 grams and maps in the article here con- 

 sidered, the reader gains nothing on being 

 told, before the direction of monoclinal 

 dip is stated, that the foundation granite 

 outci'ops near the village of Blank. He 

 profits nothing on reading that the sand- 

 stones are seen on the banks of River So- 

 and-so, the relation of the river to the 

 range being unexplained, and even the 

 direction of river flow being unmentioned. 

 Such items may be useful hints to a second 

 traveler on the ground, but they are dis- 

 tractingiy irrelevant to a reader at a dis- 

 tance. On the other hand, after a general 

 statement has been given, from which the 

 reader may form a fairly definite concep- 

 tion of the structure and form of the 

 range, it may well be added that at the 

 western base, about so far from the well- 

 defined northern end of the range, and 

 near a large exposure of the foundation 

 granite, lies the village of Blank; or that 

 at the head of a certain obsequent ravine, 

 located in such and such a way and drained 

 by the headwaters of River So-and-so, the 

 sandstones are reached at such and such 

 an altitude. 



THE NEED OF SYSTEMATIC METHODS 



The article from which these extracts 

 are taken affords a fair sample of the 

 treatment accorded to land forms in most 

 of the leading geographical journals of 

 the world and in most of the books of 

 travel, from which we must learn nearly 

 all that we know about distant lands. If 

 the article here abstracted departs from 

 the average treatment of land forms, it is 

 rather on the side of greater than of lesser 

 fulness of statement ; but here, as well as 

 in the great majority of geographical 

 books and essays, the method of treatment 

 is really no method at all, as far as this 

 division of our subject is concerned. 



