ABSTRACT
During the first quarter of the twentieth century the Davisian scheme of landform description remained fairly secure in the United States except in isolated academic pockets as at Chicago University, the domain of R. D. Salisbury. Davis, as we have seen, was the chief interpreter of foreign ideas to American physiographers and made full use of his privileges as a contributory editor of the Geographical Review and as the founder of the Association of American Geographers, to whose Annals he and his students contributed extensively. His ideas also dominated landform studies in France and the British Isles. By a strange twist of fortune, he also now found a prolific disciple in New Zealand where C. A. Cotton soon acquired an international reputation. Davis, who as usual had had a finger in this pie (see p. 471), reviewed Cotton’s first major work in 1923. It was as if Davis himself were speaking, writing and drawing. No wonder he welcomed the book. We give below brief extracts from this review of Geomorphology of New Zealand. Part I – Systematic: An Introduction to the Study of Land-Forms. The New Englander sings the praises of a New World melody echoed by a young New Zealander, who after the death of the master took over his mantle and wore it with great distinction for several decades:
It has been remarked that, in a distant colony far removed from its mother nation, the element of remoteness tends to diminish conservative and to favor progressive legislation; a result to which emigrational selection contributes powerfully by keeping at home those of satisfied desires and the energy to satisfy them. The book above named, taken in contrast with certain books of the same object published in Europe, suggests that a similar consequence of remoteness may be found in science. The presence of preconceptions, preferences, and prejudices in an old country, where educational standards have been long established, may operate to retard the adoption of novel ideas and methods. Those grounds of objection to change have less force in a young country, where conventions are yet to be formed and where new ways of doing old things therefore may be freely judged on their merits and adopted if desired without encountering the opposition that is commonly aroused by the need of changing settled habits of thought.
Cotton’s book is the work of a young physiographic geologist who for the past fifteen years has had abundant observational experience in New Zealand, who has carried into his richly varied yet compact field a trained mind unusually competent in the rational study of land forms and a skilful hand exceptionally successful in reproducing landscapes in simple outlines, and who, when it comes to describing what he has seen, has decided unequivocally in favor of a modern, genetic, explanatory method as against an old-fashioned and empirical method. Not only so: this decision does not remain an unapplied abstraction; it is given systematic application of the most practical and thoroughgoing kind in the book before us … All the chapters are copiously illustrated with ideal diagrams, landscape sketches, and half-tone views of local scenery, making 442 figures in all. The success with which type forms are matched with actual forms testifies to the remarkable physiographic wealth of New Zealand … The discriminating quality of Cotton’s treatment may be indicated by a few extracts from his pages. The introduction states that the description of land forms must be explanatory in giving some account of their geological origin and yet that it must also be geographical in that it shall not distract from present form to a consideration of past geological processes. Brevity is secured by the use of an explanatory nomenclature. Concerning the relation of uplift by which a cycle of erosion is initiated, to erosion by which it is carried on, it is remarked that ‘it simplifies the elementary study of landforms to regard this uplift as rapid. It is not to be regarded as ever sudden, or catastrophic, but it may take place so rapidly that the amount of erosion that goes on during uplift is small as compared with that which follows completion of the uplift. All uplifts are not so rapid as this, but the results produced by erosion will ultimately be very much the same whether the uplift is slow or rapid.’ As a mark of the author’s devotion to the truly geographical aspects of geomorphology it may be noted that, in strong contrast to the highly geological treatment of the subject by German geographers, Cotton excludes all geological time names even in the case of fossil peneplains in certain block mountains.
(Davis, 1923F, pp. 321–2)