Obituary: William Morris Davis

American Geographical Society

Obituary: William Morris DavisAuthor(s): Isaiah BowmanSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Apr., 1934), pp. 177-181Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/208785 .

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THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

VOL. XXIV APRIL, 1934 No. 2

WILLIAM MORRIS DAVIS

O NE cannot speak of the "loss" of Professor Davis. His interpretation of the Grand Canyon, a favorite theme, had the monumental quality of the Canyon itself. His brilliant

analysis of fault-block mountains is a part of the permanent history of the development of thought about mountain sculpture. He made the use of block diagrams universal by a unique combination of analytical power and graphic skill that continued to the end with marvelous delicacy and firmness of line and with inimitable composition. To the coral-reef problem he contributed a classic that will forever associate his name with those of Darwin and Dana, for, like them, he combined minute and widespread observational detail and generalizing power. In trying to see through to the end of a problem he was always aware of the limits of one man's thought. He once said that he would like to return to earth a hundred years after his death to see how much of "The Triassic Formation of Connecticut" had stood the test of a century's criticism.

Professor Davis was one of the exceptional men whom Shaler inspired and gathered around him in a time of great personalities. "The Coral Reef Problem" is dedicated to "my teacher at Harvard sixty years ago . . . who opened the door of opportunity through which my life work was entered upon." It was a vital personality that passed through that door. His incessantly inquiring mind, schooled in astronomy, geology, meteorology, and physiography, eventually drove toward a single goal, the analysis of land forms. Through contributions of the highest order of originality and of great vigor and variety of thought he became a world figure in his profession. Students came to him from all parts of the country and from abroad. Mountains were living things ever afterward to the person who once heard Davis explain their forms in terms of "process, structure, and stage." He accomplished his purpose not only by fascinating exposi- tions of fact and meaning but also largely by confining the attention to "relevant detail," and he underscored the phrase. It was a singu- larly dull man whose candle was not lit by the end of the first exercise!

Copyright, I934, by the American Geographical Society of New York



WILLIAM MORRIS DAVIS

February 12, 1850 - February 5, 1934



178 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

There was a relentless quality to the Davis discipline. He looked for steel and a spark, and his classes not infrequently declined in numbers as the year advanced. "Great stuff if you can stand it," was the comment. Complacent, slipshod, and uncritical work did not receive from him the coddling approval that self-expression demands in some of the schools of a later day. He believed in the virtues of discipline, and his specializing students were treated as disciples. He looked for the word in their work. The generally descriptive or eloquent line that had no bearing on the analysis was firmly blue- penciled. It was argument and fact that he wanted, not emotion. The "hyperbolic peroration" that referred to the Californian Coast Ranges as a province where "boreal zones boon the summer with zephyrs" left him unmoved. Strangely enough, this rigorously scientific mind turned often to the writing of verse, in which there was good description and sometimes deep feeling. His last address, given before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Boston, on December 28, 1933, was entitled "The Faith of Reverent Science."

On one New England field excursion he commented humorously on the care with which he was guarding the dust on his boots, accu- mulated during the previous field season in the Green River basin. He wore them again in Turkestan on the Pumpelly Expedition of the Carnegie Institution. Before the dust of one expedition was brushed off he was planning another, and whether near or far mattered little if only the field available offered material for the analysis in which he was engaged at the time. The variety and scale of his

enterprises were unpredictable. Clear Lake, California, and the bearing of its analysis upon the question of stream antecedence were as

important as the whole of Polynesia in coral-reef analysis. He could concentrate as keenly upon the Contoocook Valley of New Hampshire as upon the desert cycle of erosion. Sustained intensity of thought supported by great physical and nervous strength enabled him to push both field inquiry and analysis beyond the usual limits. There was no dawdling over anything; he "attacked" a problem.

As a Quaker he abhorred physical strife as strongly as he liked to strive mentally with his fellow man. He was a true grandson of Lucretia Mott, ardent emancipationist. In the chapter on the United States in Hugh Robert Mill's "The International Geography" (1899) Davis wrote: "Better that the plain [Southern Coastal Plain] should never have grown a pound of cotton, better that its fertile strata should never have emerged from the waters of the sea, than that

slavery and its direful, long-lasting consequences should have come

upon the United States" (p. 747). In "A Retrospect of Geography," published in December, 1932, he writes of that "advantageous event, "

the American Geographical Society's Transcontinental Excursion of



WILLIAM MORRIS DAVIS 179

1912, which enabled so many international friendships, interrupted by the World War, to be promptly resumed. But the fighting spirit is forward in "The Sculpture of Mountains by Glaciers" (I906) with a memorable paragraph entitled "A Fallacy Leading to a Quandary." The "conservatives" who would yield nothing to ice erosion in regions of cirques and hanging valleys are asked to explain how a "con- spiracy of agencies, not now known, prophetically selected all those mountainous regions that were afterwards to be glaciated, worked upon them in essentially the manner that glaciers would work if they could, and then withdrew into obscure inactivity." He con- cludes that no agency could possibly be so "circumspect." The trenchant phrases bring back Davis in his most aggressive and effective style.

This is not the place to appraise the scientific publications of Professor Davis. But his writings were so much the man and his career that a few of them should be singled out for mention even in this brief notice. "The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania" (1889) opened a new chapter in the analysis of earth features. The parts of an intricate drainage system were related to both rock structure and the evolution of the landscape. "Peneplain Davis" was an affectionate expression among his students thereafter as a result of the publication of "The Peneplain" (I899), written in reply to Tarr's criticisms. However modified, the basic idea has met the most rigorous field tests over the intervening thirty-five years. The concept of the "cycle of erosion," with its dry-climate variant for desertic regions, has stood perhaps as wide and critical examination as any generalization in science. The most analytical attacks yet made, while presenting novel and useful modifications of the idea, leave the special cases within the framework that Davis provided.

The young man who specializes in earth science will be forever indebted to Professor Davis for "the refreshing juice of explanation" that begins to flow as he follows Davis' interpretations; not so much for the conclusions as for the critical attitude of mind that is revealed. The "conscious use of mental powers" led him to emphasize the neglected deductive method and the careful selection of relevant features. Those who thought that he leaned too heavily on deduc- tion forgot his devotion to field work. It was because he found students using their minds aimlessly that he sought deliberately to confine their efforts now to one and now to another mode of analysis consciously employed. He was affectionately devoted to Grove Karl Gilbert, and his biographical memoir of Gilbert for the National Academy of Sciences is one of the finest analyses of method and mental process in scientific literature, a work truly worthy of its subject. If Gilbert's "The Inculcation of Scientific Method by Example" has led to higher standards in scientific work, so too should Davis' com-



180 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

ments on that paper; and they should be recalled to every worker in science, and not alone to geologists and geographers: the teacher "will do better to contract the phenomenal, and enlarge the logical scope of his subject, so as to dwell on the philosophy of the science rather than its material." After reading an analysis of the "scientific guess as a mental process" one should turn to Davis' comment on "the high standards of impartial objective research" and the con- clusion that the thoughtful student will be led thereby to awaken the generous elements of his nature and "to guard against egotism and selfishness."

A manuscript on the analysis of land forms submitted to him late in I925 referred to the work of Powell, Gilbert, Dutton, and Davis. It ascribed to Davis more credit than he wished to take for the development of physiography. He edited a paragraph to read as follows, and we here italicize the reference to himself: "Powell's work was note- worthy for the forceful ideas it conveyed of base-leveled surfaces; Gilbert and Dutton excelled in their analyses of individual features; Davis systematized the sequence of forms through an ideal cycle and provided a terminology." To this modest appraisal one may add that he was quick to see the excellencies and to praise the work of other men. We have mentioned his memoir of Gilbert. Equally appreciative is his biographical memoir of John Wesley Powell, whose life shows how a man of exceptional power may surmount "the limiting associations of early years, less through the opportunity provided by others than through opportunities opened by his own individual enterprise for the satisfaction of inborn interests." Davis enjoyed and often recalled the bluntness and vigor of the one-armed Civil War veteran, who first went down the Grand Canyon, directed the newly established Geo- logical Survey, and wrote unpopular things about the "arid West" that we are now able properly to appraise through a generation of hard experience.

To Professor Davis is due the organization of the Association of American Geographers in 1904, at a meeting in his native Philadelphia. He immediately urged that the Association "publish or perish." "If it's worth doing it's worth printing," was his advice to students. He believed that one should be schooled to criticism early in his career as an offset to egotism, provincialism, lazy acceptance of one's self in a routine job. He hated the "stuffed shirt" of officialdom, whether in government or in scientific institutions. He was as quick to point out a modest man doing excellent work. Phrases meant nothing to him. Davis had contempt for the long-winded accounts about fleas and lice of the untrained traveler who is utterly unaware of the Stygian darkness of his mind with respect to topographic forms and their interpretation.

With great energy and intelligence he organized the Transcon-



WILLIAM MORRIS DAVIS 18I

tinental Excursion of 1912 under the auspices of the American Geo- graphical Society, wrote a handbook of the United States for the members, urged the publication of a Memorial Volume on the Excur- sion, and brought European and American geographers into the most effective working relationship that they have ever enjoyed. He received the Cullum Geographical Medal of the Society in 1908, was exchange professor at Berlin in 1908-1909 and at Paris in 1911-1912, spoke frequently at international and national scientific meetings and congresses, conducted European excursions for students, encouraged the appointment of well-trained young physiographers to university faculties, advocated the expansion of programs of our geographical societies so as to make them scientific organizations and not merely "societies," and pressed on to the end with scarcely abated vigor and freshness of thought. The old challenge is there in "The Long Beach Earthquake" in the January number of the Geographical Review and in the essay published in the current number-remarkable papers for a man in his eighty-fourth year. His writings were ger- minant. He was a born teacher of scholars, forever sowing the seed. His students and friends will affectionately remember him for his unstinted devotion to their intellectual interests, his pride in their accomplishment, his never-ceasing zest for life, and for the stimulation of his creative spirit ever in search of new horizons.

ISAIAH BOWMAN



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Obituary: William Morris Davis