A DISTINGUISHED VISITOR

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 2142, 7 May 1914, Page 5

A DISTINGUISHED VISITOR

PROF. DAVIS. GEOGRAPHER. A distinguished visitor- to, Now Zeatiind is JPiotussor Wiliiam Alorris' Davis, geographer, who arrived ih Auckland on May 5, and will bo in Wellington ou .Uav J t anil 12. Jii an artic'o iii (lie Bulletin of the Geographical Society of . Philadelphia, Ellsworth HufttiugilAn says that Ptofessoi' Davis's Ijfo work lias been to take the mast neglected and yet,..perhaps, the most obvious branch oi • tbo subject, and 'to transform it from'a lteiro mass of utitl'iges'tod facts into A woil-developcd seieuoc. Tin; article, continuing, says* thai the positron oi geography, wherein. the greatest deftcicHcy existed when Professor Davis be--«an his career, was the study of the, hinds. Wlum Professor Davis began : to' touch geography at Harvard lift found himself f'flico to i'aeii svitH the problem of land forms. Ho sot kitflself to work to put the study of the lands upon as. firm a basis -as that of the air, oi - of ' tlio water. . . . His work placed so pre-.] ; lwnderfttili.g an emphasis- upon land : , forms that the term physiography; in t]jo mind of both the student ntid the ] ; general public,. became associiVted with { ! shese features of the subject. rather ! , than with physical geography as a . vvholo: His aim has been to develop a I ta&thod whereby :a trained ina : n can .dc-, scribe the teidseafc of any portion of the globe in the briefest possible way, itfi-'l with the maximum amount of lucidity. The first requisite in tiro eon;ptlheiision of a hill, a valley, a p'aI tejiu, a plain,' a shore-line, ei- any • other feature of the- earth's surface is [ a knowledge* of ite rooKV'structtire. ■ The second essential is a knowledge of > the processes whicli' havo acted upon rocks of it given structure. Professor Davis has taken <t foremost pla.ee iti describing ami evaluating the. enormous' differences in scenery which sriso from , the differences in tho processes of erc- ! sion. The final stop in iliecomprehc'n- ' sioii of the .form of tlio la'nd is a knowJ ledge of tho stage of crosioira! change „ which it has reacfred.; Professor Davis r saw that the form of t-hfe earth's surface is in continual, -process of .evolution. and that different stages follow ono another in ; logical order. Others before him had known that valleys change their fftr'rti from millcnnhim to miilMmiufti, but, it remained for him dis- ' siiictlv ' ami fully to set forth those stages one by ono,. and show how they / vary aecwdhig to structure ami pro- " OSSS. In conclusion, the article says: ''Ono of the strongest evidences of tho imnflrtance of Professor Davis's, fiareer is f,ho tmcotninouly widocxteul of his iivI fluenee. Of late years he ha? in--5 creased his influence 1 through his two terms of service as exchange professor —one :tl Merlin, inOS-10, and ono at. Paris, 1911-12. The success o.f these two terms is largely due la his baring tenia ri-d in German and French. As a. re-suit of ttlis lw? has been able to - influence his German aitd French - dents, just as he has influenced those ; in. America,"