Geography in the United States. — Davis. 169 
be built up with other facts into a relation of full geographic 
meaning; but taken alone it has about the same rank in geog- 
raphy that spelling has in language. A map has about the 
same place in geography that a dictionary has in literature. 
The mean annual temperature of a given station, and the oc- 
currence of a certain plant in a certain locality, are facts of 
kinds that must enter extensively into th^ relationships >vith 
which geography deals ; but these facts, standing alone, are 
wanting in the essential quality of mature geographical science. 
Not only so; many facts of these kinds may, when treated in 
other relations, enter into other sciences ; for it is not so much 
the thing that is studied as the relation in which it is studied 
that determines the science to which it belongs. I therefore 
emphasize again the broad general principle that mature sci- 
entific geography is essentially concerned with, the relations 
among its inorganic and organic elements ; among the ele- 
ments of physical and of organic geography ; or, as might be 
said more briefly, among the elements of physiography and of 
. Let me confess to the most indulgent part of this 
audience that I have invented a one-word name for the organic 
part of geography, and have found it useful in thinking and 
writing and teaching; but inasmuch as the ten, or at the out- 
side, twelve new words that I have introduced as technical 
terms into the growing subject of physiography have given me 
with some geological critics the reputation of being reckless 
in regard to terminology, it will be the part of prudence not to 
mention the new name for organic geography here, where my 
audience probably consists for the most part of geologists. 
There can be no just complaint of narrowness in a science 
that has charge of all the relations among the elements of 
terrestrial environment and the items of organic response. 
Indeed the criticism usually made upon the subject thus de- 
fined is, as has already been pointed out, that it is too broad, 
too vaguely limited, and too much concerned with all sorts of 
things to have sufficient unity and coherence for a real science. 
Some persons indeed object that geography has no right to 
existence as a separate science; that it is chiefly a compound 
of parts of other sciences ; but if it be defined as concerned 
with the relationships that have been just specified, these ob- 
