The History of the Study of Landforms Volume 2

The Life and Work of William Morris Davis

R. P. Beckinsale, Mrs R J M Chorley, R. J. Chorley, A J Dunn, A. J. Dunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9781032297057
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135836511
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

This volume is entirely devoted to the life and work of the world's most famous geomorphologist, William Morris Davis (1850-1934). It contains a treatment in depth of Davis' many contributions to the study of landforms including:

• the cycle of erosion
• denudation chronology
• arid and karst geomorphology
• the coral reef problem.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

In writing our History of the Study of Landforms we have always been aware that there loomed ahead a precipice in the form of William Morris Davis. Our course, so far, has been beset by numerous pitfalls and obstacles many of which have proved exciting and hindering as the trail was unblazed and there were few major landmarks to guide us. Yet we knew where we wanted to go even if the details of the route demanded careful reconnaissance. But the fact is that Davis has proved to be a rock-wall that could be tackled only with modern equipment. In our ignorance we assumed that many Americans with psychological crampons had climbed the Davisian precipice, that a path already existed up which we could safely scale the heights to assess the summit panorama and the country ahead. Instead we found ourselves with numerous scattered writings, like tortuous paths up the scree at the foot of a rock-wall which had barely been reconnoitred. We had no option but to climb our Everest and write a biography of Davis. It seemed astonishing to us that whereas, for example, geologists have several books, many quite recent, on Lyell, geographers have no sizeable book on Davis. But we can assure the reader that Davis is the only man to whom in our history of landforms we would devote a whole volume.

To those who think that Davis was a geographer rather than a geomorphologist, we recommend an incident on the International Transcontinental Excursion across the United States in 1912 when, according to Mark Jefferson: ‘A very lively discussion … ended in Dr. Niermeyer telling Davis that he was no geographer but a geomorphologist’:

As usual he (Davis) spoke only of physical geography. He is too fair to deny this when accused of it and admits that he is really a physical geographer, but when Dr. Niermeyer of Utrecht rose and called attention to the point, everyone got excited and seemed to feel that Niermeyer was out of order. (Letter: Mark Jefferson to his wife, 5 September 1912; from Martin, 1968, p. 140)

We can recommend too the views of Douglas Wilson Johnson, one of Davis’ most famous geomorphological students. Apparently Davis’ geography was always dominated by geomorphology and at best was a rather crude form of environmental determinism. Most of his writings were not strictly ‘geographical’ in character, at least in any modern sense:

The reader who studies his Geographical Essays in the chronological order of their publication (indicated in the Preface of the work) will be impressed by the fact that in his earlier writings he makes present form the criterion by which things geographical are to be distinguished from things geological. Of the trilogy ‘structure, process and stage’, structure and process are definitely excluded as geological, and the portion of geological time occupied in the evolution of a landform to a given stage of development seems also to be excluded. At this time there was no question of the relation of form to organic life. Later Davis makes this relationship the unifying principle of geography, and seems to exclude from geography all physical studies not specifically directed to the elucidation of the relationship between physical environment and organic life.

Thus while Professor Davis’s writings, considered as a whole, may appear to support the view that geomorphology is geography rather than geology, he has in later years moved much closer to the conception of geography advocated in the present essay. I understand that he would not now consider most of his writings as strictly geographic in character, and that he would classify himself as a physiographer or geomorphologist rather than as a geographer. (Johnson, 1929, p. 209, footnote)

There probably never was any doubt that the biography of Davis belongs quite properly to any history of the study of landforms. For that reason we have already outlined his early ideas in Volume One where he appears at the end of an epoch. In the present volume we expand in detail upon his geomorphological and geographical ideas and in subsequent volumes we intend to show their influence on his contemporaries and on modern authors. However, in Volume One and in Volume Three we deal mainly with published works which can be readily assessed on their relative merits. In the present volume we have perforce dealt also with his private influence – with his copious letters which may be called his ‘hidden persuaders’, and with his personal impact or what might be termed his psycho-physical persuasion.

However, to assess the influence of the abundant letters, apart from the herculean task of obtaining and sifting them, was less difficult than the assessment of Davis’ character and personal influence. We felt that our threepronged attack – by an oldish don, a youngish don and an active civil servant – needed reinforcement, so we consulted psychologists who left us in no doubt that we were fifty years too late, that our posthumous method needed more than psychological skill, that what we should do was to let Davis reveal himself and let his host of acquaintances reveal both themselves and him. Consequently we have refused to dogmatize and have, like Chesterton’s Father Brown, set out not to prove anything but merely to display what will prove itself.

It is, of course, impossible to divorce the person from his ideas and personal achievements, and in his lifetime Davis was too important and too prolific to be ignored. Not surprisingly his contemporaries fell mainly into two categories: those who disagreed with his theories and clearly resented his dominance of geographic thought, and those who supported his ideas and regarded him with genuine respect. There should be a middle choice but it is hard to find and now that the influence of Davis is waning it would be all too easy to take the side of the less friendly critics. However, although this biography is not an exercise in adulation, the evidence available would not allow it to become a massive project of demolition. Its main aims are to sketch the social and scientific climate and the domestic and scholastic environment that moulded the man and his ideas, and to assess his value in the history of geomorphological progress.

The reader will not be surprised to find that the letters quoted vary widely in quality as evidence. Davis’ own letters belong to an age when wordy epistles were penned daily fresh from an experience or demand. So many of them have a coating of justification, wishful thinking, glorification, pontification and so on that they reveal a fascinating ambivalence. But once dispatched they were gone from him beyond recall except in memory and we alone see the total sequence and the final balance sheet.

The numerous assessments of Davis written by his acquaintances, some of whom happily survive, also reveal widely different opinions and facets, as the following extracts show.

I can say this, that up to the very end he maintained an amazingly high degree of activity and great enthusiasm. He was a fluent, well-organised lecturer, and this made him an effective teacher. I can remember walking into classrooms that he had just vacated and seeing typical, very beautiful Davis landscape diagrams all over the blackboards. One story oft repeated around here concerned a graduate student on his way to one of Davis’ classes late one afternoon. This student was notably indolent, and on that particular day he was at a very low ebb in terms of his general outlook on life, science, education, and the state of the Union. An hour later, he came rushing down the hall with fire in his eyes, wildly gesticulating, and announcing that he was going out at once to measure slopes on alluvial fans, as this was just about the most important thing any man could do. From this we can judge that Davis had real impact on his students, and was successful in transferring his enthusiasm to them. (Letter: R. P. Sharp to R. J. Chorley, 18 January 1962; Pasadena, California)

I have several rather vivid memories of Davis. One was when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, and he and Daly debated the coral reef theories at a meeting of the Harvard Geological Club. The meeting went on until a late hour with no one noticing the clock. It was terrific. Both men were vehement, but completely impersonal. I was greatly stimulated at the idea that two scholars could argue so heatedly without letting personal remarks mar the encounter.

Davis was a severe critic, and spared no one’s feelings. I remember a graduate seminar in which there was one Radcliffe girl who had just returned from Peru. She gave a paper describing certain landforms in the Andes, and Davis really gave her a bad time with criticisms that were quite just, but a little vigorous. She started to cry. Whereupon a male student at the seminar shook his finger at Davis and said, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ I never saw Davis so completely speechless. (Letter: Preston E. James to R. J. Chorley, 11 January 1962; Syracuse, New York)

Both descriptions tell us something different: the first emphasizes Davis’ artistic skill and powers of persuasion; the other, in a more intimate way, shows not a benign old man exercising a kindly tolerance acquired from a half century of understanding but an intellectual ice-pick.

Two further quotations must for the moment suffice to exemplify the adulation of a devoted protegé and the adverse criticism of a specialist who immediately saw a weakness in Davis’ landform studies:

The more you checked his teaching against the out-of-doors, the sounder you found it. Surely Davis read God’s thoughts about the surface of the earth. (Mark Jefferson, autobiographical notes, 1947; in Martin, 1968, p. 41)

Davis was simply not concerned at all with the chemistry of weathering and physics of slope formation. As he grew older, he drifted away more and more from any concern with the geological facts behind the landscape. This is illustrated by an incident that occurred when I last saw Davis, only a few years before his death. He visited Prof. Fenneman, one of his most devoted admirers and followers, while he was returning from studies in the Great Basin. He spoke before the faculty and advanced students in our department of geology at Cincinnati. He drew diagrams on the blackboard and showed photographs to illustrate his contention that many of the gentle slopes exhibited by crystalline mountain ranges in the Great Basin, were scarps of low-angle normal faults, as low as 11° to 17°, or that order of magnitude. In the discussion that followed his address, I commented that I considered an alternative explanation possible, namely, that the slopes reflected the gentle dip of foliation in metamorphic schists. I asked if he had looked at the nature of the rocks on those slopes. Davis turned to me and said in a stern tone, something to this effect: ‘Young man, you have yet to learn that the essential facts of geomorphology are best seen at a great distance.’ There was no answer to that comment, of course. (Letter: W. H. Bucher to R. J. Chorley, 22 February 1962; Houston, Texas)

It soon becomes obvious that no quotation is in itself conclusive; each is representative – no more; each illustrative of the varied impressions generated by the currents of the man’s complex personality and ideas. The result is a bewildering palimpsest of outlines, some coincidental and others totally dissimilar. Our biography thus becomes largely the coincidence of the maximum occurrences of certain impressions and actions.

In this connection, it seems to us that biographers of scientists often deal too exclusively with the daily round and progressive outcome of their subjects’ productive years. We do not intend to assume, as Davis himself often did in landform study, that the basic origin matters little. For man, as for physical landscapes, there is a stage before youth which is of great significance, and we shall start with the young Davis’ parental environment.

Davis himself clearly envisaged that his biographical memoir for the National Academy of Sciences would be as exhaustive as his own memoir of G. K. Gilbert (1927F) had been.

When you get back to Shirley, look in the package of my own letters – if you havent thrown them away or burnd them up – and let me know if any are found as far back as my Rocky Mtn trip of 1869. A request comes from Colorado to send an article about my adventures of that summer, especially about the ascents of Mts. Harvard and Yale.

Please take note also that these letters are, after my death, to be placed at the disposition of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, for their use in preparing my memoir; but to be returned to Billy when they are finisht. When that time comes, write first to the Secy. N.A.S. and say what you have been told to do, and ask his instructions as to when and where. (Letter: W. M. Davis to his son Edward, 2 March 1932; Pasadena, California)

The short memoir prepared by Daly (1945) hardly measures up to Davis’ expectations, and it is hoped that the present volume will remedy this deficiency.

This book is richly illustrated with Davis’ landscape drawings, but it is important to remember that he himself used them for more than illustrative purposes. Davis’ drawings were not mere depictions of terrain, but interpretations of it – subtle idealizations in which features significant to his theories were cleverly accentuated to provide what amounted to models of terrain types. Sometimes he would carry this method to the extreme of producing idealized composite views. At a time when photography was becoming both popular and inexpensive, it is significant that Davis did not exploit this technique, for he required not the objective camera eye but the trained eye of the scientist. Just as later geomorphologists recorded their observational data in tabular or other form, Davis used his field sketches as data storage systems which were made more explicit and internally logical as they were recollected in tranquillity. More than this, as we shall see particularly in his work on coral reefs, Davis’ drawings were often vehicles for his research, wherein initial forms were postulated and the consequences of possible sequences of events logically deduced by careful geometrical drawings, and the end products compared with the real world according to the dictates of the method of multiple working hypothesis.

Thus we make no apology for devoting the whole of the second volume of this History of the Study of Landforms to William Morris Davis, nor for stressing his biographical details. This remarkable scholar found the study of landforms a fortuitous assemblage of peripheral principles developed as the byproducts of geology, geography, engineering and other sciences; he left it a coherent discipline. No matter whether, as his detractors assert, he created a Frankenstein whose limited genetic composition was to restrict the development of the science for the next half century, or whether his conceptual model was as capable of adaptation and proliferation as his supporters aver, Davis’ genius resided in his own peculiar brand of alchemy which assembled, and breathed life into, a viable, intellectual entity.

The details of his career and personality find their natural place in this volume, for the fundamentally deductive and evolutionary basis of his work sprang as much from his own mental make-up and the intellectual environment of his day as from requirements inherent in the nature of landforms themselves. The ebb and flow of his scholarship were largely dictated by the circumstances of his life. He was first and last a Victorian gentleman; proud, austere, disciplined and aloof. Yet within him there was a sustained flame which produced some of his most imaginative and benign writings long after his allotted three-score years and ten. By modern standards he was simple and direct to the point of naivety, by any absolute standards he embodied the traditional integrity of his Quaker stock. He adored his parents and his own family but, at least during his early and mature years, was often unable to establish warm personal understanding with others. This inability, combined with an almost religious egocentricity which characterized most of his life, led not only to much loneliness but also to significant dogmatism and to many misunderstandings with his academic contemporaries. His Quaker values, emotional reticence and love of nature, evolution and logical deduction are inexorably intertwined in his writings.

Davis’ huge literary output was at one and the same time wide-ranging and repetitive; concerned with limited themes but subjected to almost infinite variations; sustained by world-wide excursions yet prompted by mental deduction; rigidly constructed yet flexible; generated with scholarly aloofness yet popularized with uncanny insight. By devoting the whole of one large volume to him we have been able to identify and examine his main contributions to the study of landforms, or geomorphology, as well as to the natural sciences related to it. We have not neglected his writings on meteorology, geography, geology and the philosophy of science but they seemed to us to lack the outstanding importance of his studies of landforms. We happen to know that he himself would have championed our view. He wished to be remembered as ‘a founder of physiographic geology’, by which is meant the study of landforms, and as ‘a foremost investigator and an inspiring teacher’.

Inevitably some details of his geomorphic work will be mentioned again in Volume Three of our History of the Study of Landforms where we shall discuss the contributions to geomorphology made by his fellow-scientists. But, as we have said, it was necessary to deal first with the work of William Morris Davis because he to a great extent provided the backcloth against which the development of geomorphology between the 1880s and 1930s was played out. His was the yardstick with which the success of others was judged; his the conception which evoked both the action and reaction of his contemporaries.

PART ONE

Youth

FIG. 1. Davis at the age of twelve (Courtesy W. M. Davis II, Bass River, Mass.)

CHAPTER TWO

Early Environment

William Morris Davis was born in Philadelphia on 12 February 1850, eleven years before the outbreak of the American Civil War. Though not taking any direct part in the war, its background of common tragedy and hysterical clamour must have affected him as it did other Americans. Not only did it colour his life in this general way but it touched him directly through his father, who served on General Fremont’s staff, and through his grandmother, Lucretia Mott. Much of these early years was spent within an atmosphere subject to the powerful influence of his grandmother. He could hardly have followed a more potent guide-star. She had a per...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One: Youth
• Part Two: Maturity
• Part Three: Old Age
• Part Four: Final Rejuvenation
• Appendices
• Indexes