ABSTRACT
The earliest general classification of landforms seems to have been that by Passarge (1919). His system was hierarchical and remains one of the most comprehensive produced. It included five categoric levels of descending importance: 'type', 'class', 'order', 'family', and 'kind'. The two types represented land and coastal forms. The classes within each of these were those mainly suffering erosion and those mainly experiencing aggradation. Orders identified the main types of processes: tectonic, volcanic, and eruptive. Families subdivided these on the basis of the main forms in which processes are expressed, e.g. the faulted, flexured, and fractured families of the tectonic order. Finally, the kinds represented the degree to which the characteristics of the family were expressed, e.g. the distinction between symmetrical, asymmetrical, and overthrust kinds of the faulted family.
