ANNALS of the

Association of American Geographers

Volume 64

June, 1974

Number 2

THE FOURTH DIMENSION OF GEOGRAPHY

CARL 0. SAUER
ABSTRACT. A participant observer notes the manner of entry of Geography into
American universities. It was outlined and accepted as an earth science. Its content
is concerned with time as well as place, time that is nonrecurrent, ongoing rather
than cyclic. Digressions from this substantive orientation lead to nonproductive ends.
KEY WORDS: Berkeley school, T . C . Chamberlin, William Morris Davis, Rollin Salisbury, Time.

T the beginning of this century Geography

A
was one of the basic subjects in our elementary schools, as it had been for generations.
History was taught mainly to instruct the youth
in the origin and development of the United
States. Geography dealt with the entire world,
its physical and cultural diversity expressed in
regions, which were most conveniently studied
as countries. The political entity as unit of study
tended to be eclectic choice of whatever seemed
to be its conspicuous aspect of nature and
society.
The American Book Company, publishers of
McGufieys Eclectic Readers, had Baron von
Steinwehr, a cartographer and a general in the
Union Army, do a series of Eclectic Geographies that set the pattern of school texts for
decades, wel! illustrated by maps and pictures.
The school geographies written by a Confederate Officer, Matthew Fontaine Maury,
stressed physical geography and processes.
Neither author has had the deserved attention
in the shaping of American school geography.
Geography as taught in the schools came
under the criticism that the pupils were drilled
Accepted f o r publication 22 November 1973.
Dr. Sauer is Professor Emeritus o f Geography at the
University of California in Berkeley, C A 94720.

in place names and their location, in river systems, the height of mountains, boundaries and
capitals of states. The meaning of toponymy
was lost in rote memorizing, it was said. Learning place names and their association on maps
was a dull matter, perhaps more so for teacher
than student. The normal schools, our training
centers for school teachers, felt the need of academic guidance for Geography such as History
had at universities.
Chairs of Geography had been founded early
at Princeton University (for the Swiss Arnold
Guyot) and at the University of California (for
the geodesist George Davidson, born in England). In 1892 a national committee was
formed to inquire into the condition of Geography in schools. T. C. Chamberlin, then President of the University of Wisconsin, was its
Chairman, the report largely written by William
Morris Davis of Harvard University. Chamberlin was the countrys most distinguished geologist; Davis was in charge of Physical Geography
in the Department of Geology at Harvard. The
recommendation was of an inclusive physical
earth science, from elementary through secondary schools, to prepare for entry to college and to be represented there.
Chamberlin moved in 1893 to the new University of Chicago to form there a great school
of geology, taking with him his junior associate,

ANNALS OF THE ,ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS

0 1974 by the Associabon of American Geographers. Printed in U.S.A.

189

Vol. 64, No. 2, June 1974

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CARL0. SAUER

June

Rollin Salisbury as Professor of Geographical placed the complexity of events by a general

Geology, to be given opportunity to introduce order. Theory was illustrated by models, the
courses in Geography of university level and to block diagrams which he drew so well to show
form a Department of Geography. Geography his concept of how the modelling of the land
shared the university museum with Geology. should pass from stage to stage. Davis conFor almost three decades the cohabitation con- tinued to develop and expound the cyclic order
tinued, Salisbury giving common instruction to that he thought he had discovered.
Meanwhile Ellsworth Huntington introduced
all graduate students of Geology and Geography in physiography, and in dynamic and his- climatic change as determining the course of
torical geology. Davis continued at Harvard as mankind and became an advocate of climatic
Professor of Physical Geography in the Depart- and other cycles, for which he tried to establish
a chronology by tree rings. Another kind of
ment of Geology.
Geography in the United States was given its environmental determinism was presented by
academic entry by geologists, who for years Ellen Semple, who read history from the recent
remained its sponsors and guides. Some of us American past to classical antiquity as perstarted in Geology and were attracted to the sistence of environmental advantage or denial.
new direction of linking study of the face of By both talented persons the human past was
the Earth to its human occupants. We had a explained by favor or constraint of the physibackground of observing and identifying land- cal environment, to which Huntington added
forms as to kind and origin, in particular those racial selection. When Harlan Barrows at Chiof Pleistocene and Recent geologic time. We cago took over Miss Semples lectures on
were accustomed to go out to see, name, and American history and its geographical influinterpret features of the terrain; we would now ences he distinguished between what he called
learn how to gain understanding of the patterns geographic and nongeographic factors, the latter
of mans activities. After a year of graduate added by man.
I n these formative decades we, the young
work, Professor Salisbury sent me in 1910 to
do a study of the Upper Illinois Valley. When apprentices, were encouraged to study a seasked for guidelines, he answered that I alone lected region. We went out to learn what we
would determine manner and range of what I could with a fair background of landforms and
did in the field. That first untutored field sea- a liking of the landscape. We were expected to
son opened inquiries that have continued ever gain understanding by observing the relation
after. We started with some competence in the of man to physical environment. We knew nothmorphology of the land, which was important. ing of Ratzels travels in the United States
during which he became a geographer and reBeyond that we were on our own.
The formative years of academic Geography turned home to write its Kulturgeographie, first
in the United States were greatly influenced by of its kind. Cultural geography was an unknown
Davis and Salisbury, men of greatly differing concept, but to some extent we did what he did,
temperaments. T o Salisbury the earth sciences stop wherever we found something to engage
were an interdependent field. As I was learn- our attention as significant by being there. By
ing to become a geographer I had the benefit such reconnaissance we tried to describe the
of contact with paleontologists of large insight geographic pattern of human activity and interin paleogeography. Davis, on the other hand, pret its meaningful assemblage, and began to
was seeking to establish geography as a disci- ask how the things seen came to be together. A
pline that was freed of concern with chro- first exercise in learning that geography is spanology of time and change. The geologist dealt tial differentiation of nature and culture.
Regional geography was held to be the main
with the history of the Earth and named its
chapters and paragraphs. Davis formulated a concern. The chapter by Professor Davis in
theory of recurrent geographical cycles, of up- Mills International Geography ( 1908 edition)
lift, erosion, and wearing down to a peneplain, presented the United States as a series of
passing through stages of youth, maturity, and natural regions, distinguished by relief or cliold age to rejuvenation in a new cycle. The mate, each having an economy proper to its
cycle might be long or short, its length and physical nature. Each was delimited by boundposition in time were irrelevant. Davis was our aries, the whole country being thus subdivided.
first and greatest maker of a system that re- The natural region was taken as the basic unit

1974

THE FOURTH
DIMENSION
OF GEOGRAPHY

for the study of human geography. Popular

usage provided Davis with most of the regional
names; he added more and supplied boundary
lines. Professor Davis argued that our political
boundaries largely were drawn by compass in
advance of settlement, and were improper lines
for the geographer. Instead Davis found these
in physical divisions, which he set up, largely
by a combination of landforms and climatic
regions. The regional pattern as outlined was
inadequate and improper for the patterns of
society and livelihood.
Geographers were and still are most numerous in the Midwest. It had been settled
within a century by people of European stock,
the earlier ones of colonial ancestry, those following largely immigrants from overseas. Their
descendants lived on farms and in towns that
had been occupied at the time of settlement and
which retained qualities of their origin. These
were evident and remembered, in part also were
described in accounts of pioneer times. The
then still living past, manifest in homesteads
and habits and in place names, such as former
groves and prairies, and names of their former
homes, provided the historical base of the local
geography. Regional studies involved depth of
time, at least as far back as pioneer days. The
physical background was reshaped by human
agency in directions determined by differing
cultural options. Human geography was beginning to be understood as cultural experience
of a particular space, though not as yet so called
by us.
At the beginning of the century changes in
ways of living were going on with little uprooting
of people or habits; we were becoming sedentary, attached to home place. The First World
War brought large and increasing change. A
technologic revolution was under way, staffed
by engineers, chemists, and efficiency experts.
The assembly line replaced the skilled workman. The gross national product became measure and goal of common commitment. Cities
grew mightily and rural population began a
decline that has continued to the present. The
family farm, which grew diverse field crops by
rotation, planted gardens and orchards, and
raised livestock and poultry, was beginning to
give way to specialized and mechanized agriculture. Small towns, the centers of rural communities, were becoming superfluous unless
they developed industries.

191

During World War I numerous geographers

were engaged in wartime services, such as the
Shipping Board, which allocated cargoes by
specific routes and ports. They dealt with tonnages of whatever kind from source to destination. They returned after the war to academic
life, knowledgeable in the statistics of volume
and the monetary value of the items of commerce. The universities were adding schools of
commerce and business that had use for this
sort of information, and geographers were available for such courses of instruction. They gathered statistical data, drew topical maps, and
constructed graphs, all under continuing revision to be kept up to date. Things, people,
places were quantitative aggregates to be related. Numbers in their spatial distribution were
the common concern, which in the course of
time became sophisticated to theories of spatial order, independent of real place or time.
The new breed had little experience or need
of the traditional interests of geography in the
physical, biotic, and cultural diversity of the
Earth. It was not interested in the past beyond
the short run of statistical series, but was concerned with projecting the future. The applied
geographer attached to the world of business
learned the use of statistics to chart the flow
of trade. A few were beginning to construe an
abstract world of hypothetical space and time.
I n 1923 I moved from Michigan to California to gain experience of a different country, and also to get away from what geographers
mainly were doing in the East, which interested
me less and less as narrowing professionalism.
I had begun to read seriously what German,
French, and English geographers were learning
about the world as long and increasingly modified by mans activities. The Morphology of
Landscape was an early attempt to say what
the common enterprise was in the European
tradition.
John Leighly came with me to Berkeley to
do his doctoral thesis on the historical towns
in central Sweden. The third member of the
staff was Richard Russell, native Californian,
who introduced us to nature and life in California. Loren Post and Peveril Meigs were students at the university, joined a year later by
Fred Kniffen and Warren Thornthwaite, and
shortly by others, a young group finding its way
into geography as an earth science in which the
present became intelligible by knowledge of the
past. The fourth dimension, time, was neces-

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CARL0. SAUER

sary to understanding and could not be replaced by stage, cycle, model, or environmental
influence. This gradual learning involved reading works we had not known, the contributions
to cultural geography by such men as George
Marsh, Vaughan Cornish, Brunhes, Eduard
Hahn, Ratzel, Gradmann, Schliiter, The Corridors of Time by Peake and Fleure. The spread
of mankind to the ends of the Earth, Gang der
Kultur in Hettners phrase, reached back to remote cultural beginnings.
The University of California offered a congenial place to learn from related scholars. Geologists were engaged in geomorphic studies. Soil
science had its origins here and the mapping
of soils gave insight into the processes by which
the land was formed. A group of naturalists
was outlining the distribution and assemblage
of the biota in historical depth, in fact historical
biogeography. Historians studied the American
and Spanish past of California and were well
advanced in inquiring into the northern Spanish borderlands. Above all anthropologists were
our tutors in understanding cultural diversity
and change. Robert Lowie in particular introduced us to the work of such geographers as
Eduard Hahn and Ratzel as founders of an
anthropogeography that I had not known. (At
Chicago the lone anthropologist had been
Frederick Starr whose quarters were in our
building; we knew him as a pleasant person
but not as one from whom we should learn.
There was no anthropologist at the University
of Michigan. ) Wider horizons were opened to
us at Berkeley, perhaps wider than we would
have found anywhere else.
California was an extraordinarily good ex-

June

ample of natural regions of major interest to

biologic evolution and survival, and as a pocket
in which diverse Indian tribes had lodged. Because it was so well studied we looked beyond
it for less known lands. These were nearby,
across the Mexican border. Our first expedition was to Baja California, the earlier California described by missionaries and seafarers
in Spanish days and since then largely disregarded, except by field biologists. We returned for a number of field seasons, ranging
to the southern end of the long and sparsely
inhabited peninsula. It was our field school of
physical and human geography, out of which
came a variety of studies. Former missions, in
part ruins, were guides to reconstruct past conditions and thus to include aboriginal life, here
and there still existing. Also we began to go
south along the Pacific mainland of Mexico,
there learning about Indian crops and agriculture. By chance we came upon a forgotten prehistoric high culture that extended largely the
archeologic limits of Mesoamerica. The presence of man and his works set the limits of
human geography. We were learning cultural
geography in depth in Mexico, and beyond, in
Central and South America.
The dimension of time is and has been part
of geographic understanding. Human geography
considers man as a geographic agent, using and
changing his environment in nonrecurrent time
according to his skills and wants. We now
know that he is not the master of an unlimited
environment, but that his technologic intervention in the physical world and its life has become the crisis of his survival and that of its
coinhabitants.