158 The American Geologist. m^''^^^- i^''*- 
Inattention to foreign exploration is, however, not to be fully 
explained by devotion to the geography of our own country, 
so far as the latter is measured by the pages devoted to it in 
our proceedings. The first meeting started well enough, with 
accounts of the terraces of lake Superior by Agassiz, of the 
physical geography of northern Mississippi by Bolton, and of 
the topography of Pennsylvania and Ohio by Roberts. Again, 
in 185 1, when physical geography was named with geology, 
the first subject had two essays, the distribution of animals in 
CaHfornia, and the climate, flora, and fauna of northern Ohio ; 
and geography, joined in the same year with ethnology had 
three rather scattering titles : a deep-sea bank near the Gulf 
Stream, measurement of bights by the barometer, and a geo- 
graphical department in the Library of Congress ; but this be- 
ginning had no worthy sequel. The many expeditions across 
our western territory contributed little geographic matter to 
our records; in 1856, Blake described the orography of the 
western United States, and Emory the boundary of the United 
States and Mexico; and the latter added in 1857 ^^ account of 
the western mountain systems of North America. From that 
time onward there has been very little primarily of a geograph- 
ical nature concerning the United States. Even the modern 
discussions of glacial geology in the last twenty years, profi- 
table as they have been to the physical geographers of glaciated 
regions, have in very few if any cases been presented as con- 
tributions to geography. The new phas.e of the physiography 
of the lands is scantily represented ; there have been hardly 
more than accounts of Mexico by Hill, of California by Perrin 
Smith, of North Carolina by Cobb ; it is to be noted, moreover, 
that these three authors are primarily geologists, not geograph- 
ers. This meagre showing leads one to suspect that our pro- 
ceedings do not give a fair measure of geographical activity in 
North America. 
There has been in reality a great deal of work of a geo- 
graphical nature done by our people, but the proceedings of 
the Assocation do not seem to have commended themselves 
as a place to put the work on record. Our geological surveys, 
state and national, have contributed numerous geographic chap- 
ters and reports of prime value : our Weather Bureau is in 
many respects the leading institution of its kind ; our Coast 
