928 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 807 



that opened before us. Members who ac- 

 companied the party for a week or more 

 included teachers from the universities of 

 Paris, Lyons, Marburg, Genoa, Michigan, 

 Cincinnati and North Carolina, Williams 

 College and the Lycum of Oran (Algiers), 

 as well as graduates or students from Ber- 

 lin, Lille, Vienna, Bern and Cambridge 

 (England) ; those who were with us for 

 shorter periods represented the universi- 

 ties of Grenoble, Fribourg and Harvard, 

 the military school of Fontainebleau and 

 the state normal schools of Salem, Mass. 

 and Cheney, Wash. 



Our work began on June 1, 1908, at An- 

 €ona on the Adriatic (A, Fig. 1), where 

 we studied a late mature coastal plain; 

 and ended on July 18 at Le Puy en Velay 

 in central France; and between times we 

 saw the valley of the Lamone above Faenza 

 (Fa), in the northeast flank of the Apen- 

 nines, the basins of Florence _(F) and of 

 Val d'Arno within the Apennines; the 



Fig. 1. Route of the Italian Excursion, 1908. 



'plain of Pisa (P) ; the beautiful coastal 

 forms of the Riviera Levante between 

 Spezia (Sa) and Genoa (G) ; the elbow of 

 the Tanaro valley at Bra (B), where the 

 river has been diverted from a former 

 northward to its present eastward course; 

 the lakes of Como (C), Lugano and Mag- 

 giore (M), and their associated Alpine 

 valleys, where we discussed the problem of 

 glacial erosion ; the huge terminal moraines 

 of Ivrea (Iv), and the glaciated valley of 



the Dora Baltea above them to Aosta (A) ; 

 the pass of the Little St. Bernard, by 

 which some of ms, crossed into France; the 

 French Alps in the vicinity of Grenoble; 

 and west of the Rhone the mountain belt 

 of the Cevennes, formed by the dissection 

 of the southeastern slope of the central 

 plateau. It may well be imagined that we 

 had much entertainment that was not 

 strictly geographical; yet on the whole we 

 held rather closely to the object of the ex- 

 cursion. One of the most amusing fea- 

 tures of tie journey was the necessity of 

 using several languages in our daily inter- 

 course ; and here the European members 

 of the party had great advantage over the 

 Americans by their fluency in other 

 tongues than their own. The determina- 

 tion taken by some of the American mem- 

 bers to learn at least one foreign language 

 before making another visit to Europe was 

 not the least valuable lesson of our coopera- 

 tive efforts. 



THE METHOD OP STRUCTURE, PROCESS AND 

 STAGE 



As in the case of the Chicago conference, 

 the most significant result of the Italian 

 excursion for me was again the prevailing 

 absence^ among the members of the party 

 of any conscious and matured method for 

 the description of land forms. That the 

 method with which I had been experi- 

 menting was not familiar to my European 

 companions was surely not due to any 

 recondite elements in it, for there are 

 none; all its elements are taken from the 

 common experience of geologists and 

 physical geographers. In so far as the 

 method has any novelty, it is to be found 

 in the systematic treatment of well-known 

 elements ; and even in this respect it is not 

 so novel as some have seemed to suppose. 

 Its fundamental principles are to be 

 found, for example, in the third edition of 



