TRAINING OF GEOGRAPHERS 243 



offered. Chicago is the best organized and most complete ; Columbia is 

 strong in industrial geography. Every region except the South Central 

 has at least one college or university offering four years or more of work. 

 In this connection attention may well be called to a recent paper in the 

 Journal of Geography,® in which the "geography of college grade" as 

 offered by the normal schools of the Middle States is reviewed in detail, 

 with the conclusion that, "in general, normal schools offer the logical 

 place to begin specialization in geography." At present, "geography 

 stands by itself as an independent department in nearly every one of the 

 Middle States normal schools," but in the reorganization of these which 

 is already beginning there "will be a strong effort to include it (geog- 

 raphy) under a department of science and perhaps mathematics. , . ." 

 Such an outcome would put an additional burden on the colleges as 

 standard-bearers of geography as a distinct science and add to the signifi- 

 cance of the figures presented in this paper. 



Publications dealing with North American Geology and 



Geography 



studies by mr. a. h. brooks 



Bibliographic lists and pages of publications are poor criteria for deter- 

 mining the value or number of contributions to a science, but they do give 

 some evidence of scientific activities. An exhaustive analysis of publica- 

 tions, even for a single year, would not yield results commensurate with 

 the labor involved. Fortunately, the IT. S. Geological Survey issues annual 

 bibliographies of North American Geology in which the articles are num- 

 bered and classified. A study of these lists was made by A. H. Brooks^ for 

 the years 1886-1909, and this has been extended to the year 1918 by an 

 analysis of publications listed for the decade 1909-1918. The combined 

 study shows a fairly steady increase in the number of articles listed, from 

 less than 300 in 1886 to 1,350 in 1903. From that date to 1914 there 

 was little or no increase, the annual numbers ranging from 1,150 to 1,400 

 between 1903 and 1910. Since 1910 the number has fallen to less than 

 1,100. It is instructive to note that, although these lists as analyzed by 

 Brooks showed 47 per cent devoted to "applied geology" in 1909, the 

 falling off in the curve of literary production coincides with the begin- 

 nings of the oil activities during the first decade of this century. Prob- 

 ably no period has been more prolific of high-grade accurate work in 

 geology, especially in "applied geology," and this falling off in the record- 



* Clyde E. Cooper : Status of geography in the normal schools of the Middle West. 

 Journal of Geography, September, 1020. 



" Journal, Wasliington Academy of Sciences, vol. II, 1912, p. 20. 



