Problems connected with political boundaries have frequently elicited the interest of geographers. In all countries with chronic or acute boundary problems the geographers are drawn into the general discussion, more or less as experts, and in some cases the professional geographer has actually been called upon to assist in the determination and demarcation of boundaries.
Geographers and agricultural economists have become increasingly interested in recent years in studying the associations of crops and livestock in different types of agriculture, in contrast to the separate consideration of individual crops or products.
Of all territorial settlements made at the end of the World War none has been so frequently criticized as that which we call the .
The primary problem of [is] the analysis of the degree to which the diverse regions of the state constitute a unity.
Numerous geographers writing in recent years concerning the nature and scope of their subject have described the relation of their field to other fields of science in terms of a concept said to stem from Immanuel Kant and from Alexander von Humboldt. Whatever may be the original source of the concept, its importance in the current geographic thought stems from the writing of , the German master of the methodology of geography.
Geographers are wont to boast of their subject as a very old one, extending, even as an organized science, far back to antiquity. But often when geographers in this country discuss the nature of their subject, whether in symposia or in published articles, one has the impression that geography was founded by a group of American scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Geography is not an infant subject, born out of the womb of American geology a few decades ago, which each new generation of American students may change around at will.
Although the roots of geography, as a field of study, reach back to Classical Antiquity... its establishment as a modern science was essentially the work of the century from 1750 to 1850. The second half of this period, the time of Humboldt and Ritter, is commonly spoken of as the "classical period" of geography.
Science is... in the broadest sense of organized, objective knowledge.
Landscape - the external surface of the earth beneath the atmosphere... is merely an outward manifestation of most of the factors at work in the area.
So important, indeed, is the use of maps in geographic work, that, without wishing to propose any new law, it seems fair to suggest to the geographer a ready rule of thumb to test the geographic quality of any study he is making: if his problem cannot be studied fundamentally by maps - usually by a comparison of several maps - then it is questionable whether or not it is within the field of geography.
The unique purpose of geography is to seek comprehension of the variable character of areas in terms of all the interrelated features which together form that variable character.
Geography is concerned to provide accurate, orderly, and rational description and interpretation of the variable character of the earth surface.
Geography is that discipline that seeks to describe and interpret the variable character from place to place of the earth as the world of man.
We may once again modify our statement of the purpose of geography to read: the study that seeks to provide scientific description of the earth as the world of man.