4 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



at the end of each day's journey, and this indeed is a very essential item 

 in good physiographic work. 



To facilitate our observations and to aid us in understanding the 

 features of the region under consideration, we have at our command an 

 almost inexhaustible amount of literature. Probably no other region of 

 the world has been studied so intensively and in so truly a scientific way 

 as the area that interests us. The work of many masters, fostered by the 

 institutions of learning concentrated here in the east and developed out 

 of the earlier fundamental studies in geology and physiography, is accessi- 

 ble to every one of us and there is no literature in any branch of knowl- 

 edge so easy of reference and so well catalogued as the geological and 

 physiographic literature of this country. 



Then there is a practical and even more important reason why we 

 should turn our attention toward these opportunities so near at hand. 

 The war has brought before us a great problem to which we have to 

 adjust ourselves. Travel must be kept at a minimum. The railroads 

 are overburdened with traffic and traveling for pleasure cannot be en- 

 couraged. Moreover, we are all practicing economy in every direction. 

 Since these things are true, would it not be better for us to stay at home 

 altogether ? Decidedly not ! Our most important duty, if we are unable 

 to take an active part in the furtherance of the war, is to carry along 

 our tasks in the most efficient and excellent way possible, and it fortu- 

 nately happens in the case of the physiographer that he can combine 

 the means of taking recreation with the improvement of himself in a 

 professional way. At the present time he must do these things without 

 going so very far afield. When I tell you that I propose to keep him 

 within a circle having a radius of 300 miles and centering in New York, 

 I am prepared to defend it on several grounds. If it seems too generous 

 I must argue that this circle just includes within its margin several points 

 of particular interest : Niagara Falls, Norfolk and Cape Henry, the Blue 

 Ridge and Shenandoah Valley, the Adirondacks, the Allegheny Front in 

 western Pennsylvania, and the White Mountains. If it seems too small 

 my argument then is that the traveler must go far beyond its limits to 

 find a region offering any new types of physiography materially different 

 from those thus circumscribed, for he has here a great concentration of 

 physiographic provinces. The New England Upland, with its monad- 

 nock groups and its extension southward in the Manhattan and Reading 

 prongs, the Adirondack portion of the great Archean massive, parts of 

 the Great Lakes Province, the Allegheny Plateau, the Older Appalachians 

 terminating northward in the Cumberland and Trenton prongs, the 

 Newer Folded Appalachians so exquisitely developed in Pennsylvania, the 



