488 ANNUAL REPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. 1&19. 
The mapping of the national domain in an adequate and detailed 
manner was well started, but less than 360,000 square miles had then 
been covered by surveys for this purpose. New York had then con- 
toured maps covering little more than 1,000 miles of surface, and the 
great States of Illinois and Wisconsin were, as regards maps, in a 
backward condition. 
The conditions as thus rehearsed do not mean that there were no 
advances in American geography prior to the year 1890. In the realm 
of regional knowledge, the geological and natural history surveys of 
New York and other States had been long assembling geographic 
data of many kinds. Ten years before this date the fugitive and 
fragmentary organizations for the study of our national domain had 
been succeeded by the United States Geological Survey. In that 
Survey, Powell, Gilbert, Button, and others laid broad and deep the 
foundations of American physiography. 
For a period of 20 years, under the directorship of Maj. J. W. 
Powell and Dr. Charles D. Walcott, the annual reports of the Sur- 
vey included a series of scientific essays, which were geographical 
as well as geological in their scope — extended papers written in non- 
technical stjde, papers which may be regarded as classics of earth 
science. Among these essays were the following : Button's Hawaiian 
Volcanoes and the Charleston Earthquake; Gilbert's Topographic 
Features of Lake Shores; Chamberlin's Artesian Wells, Terminal 
Moraine of the Second Glacial Epoch, and other glacial papers; 
Russell's Glaciers of the United States ; Shaler's Essays on Seacoast 
Swamps, Harbors, Fresh-water Morasses and Soils, and his regional 
accounts of Mount Desert, Cape Ann, Cape Cod, and Martha's 
Vineyard. 
There was also growing, 30 and 20 years ago, an important geo- 
graphic literature in hydrography and irrigation as embodied in 
various publications of the Geological Survey. 
A review of the field at the present time shows marked progress 
along several lines. In the early nineties the famous report of the 
Committee of Ten to the National Educational Association marked 
a new era in secondary and elementary geography. The subcom- 
mittee for geograph}'^ contained some of our most eminent students 
of earth science, and a group of texts embodying their recommenda- 
tions soon found entrance into the schools. The result was an over- 
emphasis upon physical geography, from which in recent years there 
has been a reaction, but the impetus given to rational geography was 
nevertheless of great value. Interest in human and relational geog- 
raphy was awakened, and new texts were prepared for geography 
in the grades. These texts have recognized both physical and 
human and have developed in forms suitable to the youthful mind 
the relations of men to land forms, climate, soils, and all natural 
