Geography in the United States. — Davis. 175 
of always associating causes with their consequences and con- 
sequences with their causes, and of always referring both 
causes and consequences to the classes in which they belong. 
If to these two habits we add a third, namely, that of making 
a careful arrangement of the classes in a reasonable and ser- 
viceable order, we shall have taken three important steps in 
geographical progress, and, as a result, geography will flourish. 
There is no device by which the work of the specialist is 
so helpfully relieved of its narrowing influence as by the simple 
device of looking always for the general geographical relations 
of any special topic. The specialist in the geographical study 
of ocean currents, of caverns or of deltas, of forests, of trade 
routes, or of cities, should not lessen his attention to his chosen 
line of work, but he should, often to his great advantage, in- 
crease his attention to the place that his chosen subject holds 
in the whole content of geography. Not only will his work be 
broadened in this way, but both he and his work will be brought 
into closer relations with the whole body of geographers and 
the whole content of geography, and the possibility of organiz- 
ing a society of mature geographical experts will be thereby 
greatly increased. If the geographical relations of a special 
topic are not looked for, the specialist fails to that extent of 
becoming a geographer. The climatologist who studies the 
physical conditions of the atmosphere for their own sake, the 
oceanographer who makes no application of the physical fea- 
tures of the ocean as controls of organic consequences, the 
geomorphist who is satisfied with the study of land forms as a 
finality, the student of the location of cities and the boundaries 
of states who makes no search for the explanation of his facts 
as afi'ected by physiographic controls — these specialists may all 
be eminent in their own lines, but they fall short of being ge- 
ographers. In the same way it might be shown that a petrog- 
rapher who makes no study of field relations and discovers no 
results of processes and no sequences in time, fails of Ijeing 
a geologist, for geology deals essentially with processes and 
structures in time sequence ; likewise a chronologist who is 
satisfied with mere dates of occurrence fails of being a his- 
torian, for history involves the meaning as well as the mere se- 
quence of human events. There is. of course, no blame to be 
altaclicd to interest in specialization, no praise to an interest 
