ADVANTAGE OF TERMS OVER PHRASES 115 



dering Yallev without exciting remark as being an overventurous tres- 

 passer, although it is plain that the real meaning of the single term 

 volcano, as well as of the explanatory descriptive phrase, is crammed full 

 of past conditions and processes and changes. But if he explicitly para- 

 phrases those past changes, as was done in case of the long explanatory 

 account of the Front Range, he is regarded as having left his proper field 

 for that of geology. 



The lesson from this is clear enough. If, instead of describing the 

 structures and reciting the succession of events that lead up to the exist- 

 ing forms which are treated in the explanatory description of the Front 

 Range, we had a single term which immediately indicated the general 

 result of all this succession, the term might be used with all its implica- 

 tions and yet without exciting the fear that in using it geographers were 

 metamorphosing themselves into geologists. True, if the Front Range 

 were the only example of its kind, it would be hardly worth while to 

 invent a term to name it ; but such is by no means the case. Similar suc- 

 cessions of events on similar structures producing similar forms are well 

 known elsewhere, and a generic term for all of them, with specific adjec- 

 tives to indicate their different expressions, would be very helpful in geo- 

 graphical descriptions. Let it be remembered that in inventing and 

 using a single term for the easy statement of a complicated idea or type, 

 geographers would only be following the example set by workers in other 

 sciences. Consider the biological term metabolism ; instead of attempting 

 here to define its meaning, we may accept the assurance of biologists that 

 this word is packed full of elaborate meaning, and that its use saves much 

 round-about paraphrasing. Geographers might well follow the example 

 of their fellow-scientists in this respect. Allow me to recount a recent 

 exjjerinient in the invention of a systematic name for such district as that 

 of the Colorado Front Range. 



.4.V EXPERIMENT IN THE INVENTION OF A TERM 



During a geographical pilgrimage from Ireland to Italy that I con- 

 ducted in the summer of 1911, several of the pilgrims tried to find a term 

 that might be used to name a region of composite structure, consisting of 

 an older undermass, usually made up of deformed crystalline rocks, that 

 had been long ago worn down to small relief and that was then depressed, 

 submerged, and buried beneath a heavy overmass of stratified deposits, the 

 composite mass then being uplifted and tilted, the tilted mass being 

 truncated across its double structure by renewed erosion, and in this worn- 

 down condition rather evenly uplifted into a new cycle of destructive evo- 

 lution. The older mass of such a structure would in its relation to the 



