William Morris Davis

William Morris Davis: The Man Who Gave Landscapes a Biography

In 1882, the president of Harvard, Charles William Eliot, advised a struggling young instructor in his thirties to look for work elsewhere. The instructor's teaching had drawn no praise and his research none either. He stayed. Within a decade William Morris Davis had produced the idea that would organise the study of landforms for the next century, and by the time he retired he was known, without much argument, as the father of American geography.

A Quaker Inheritance

Davis was born in 1850 into a prominent Philadelphia Quaker family. His mother, Maria Mott Davis, was a daughter of Lucretia Mott, the abolitionist and women's rights campaigner — which placed him, by birth, close to the most serious reforming circles in nineteenth-century America.

He went to Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School to study geology and geography, taking his S.B. in 1869 and a master's in mining engineering from the Hooper School of Mining in 1870. As a student he joined a Harvard geological expedition to the Colorado Territory under Josiah Dwight Whitney, surveying the Rocky Mountain peaks; the party named the highest of the Collegiate Peaks Mount Harvard and the second Mount Yale.

Then came three years at an observatory in Argentina, and a stretch as a bookkeeper in Philadelphia — a young man of exceptional training doing nothing much with it. In 1876 the geologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler hired him back to Harvard to teach.

The Slow Start

The next six years produced Eliot's suggestion that he leave. What Davis had, and what nobody had yet noticed, was a particular combination: relentless observation in the field, a gift for logical deduction, and an unusual ability to synthesise scattered facts into a single structure. He simply had not yet found the problem those talents were for.

Geology in the 1880s was awash in landform description. Surveys had been mapping the American West for decades and had produced an enormous, undigested inventory of valleys, ridges, terraces and river systems, with no framework connecting them. The field could describe. It could not explain.

The Cycle of Erosion

Davis's answer, first laid out in an 1889 paper on the rivers and valleys of Pennsylvania and elaborated in publications from 1886 to 1911, was to give landscapes a life story.

Take a block of land uplifted by tectonic forces. Rivers begin cutting into it. In *youth*, the valleys are narrow and deeply incised, and the streams work aggressively downward. In *maturity*, the difference between hilltop and valley floor reaches its maximum, the drainage network branches to its greatest complexity, and valleys widen as they deepen. In *old age*, the relief has been worn down to broad valleys with meandering channels across a gently rolling lowland — what Davis named a *peneplain*. A new episode of uplift could interrupt the sequence and start it again: *rejuvenation*.

The debt to Darwin and Lamarck was explicit and deliberate. Davis had done for topography what evolutionary biology had done for organisms — replaced a catalogue of forms with a developmental sequence. Any landscape could now be placed on a timeline, and its stage read off from its shape.

The effect on the discipline was total. It moved geomorphology, as one assessment puts it, from purely local description to global explanation. Practitioners still divide the field's history into before Davis and after Davis.

The Blackboard

Davis became a full professor in 1890 and, in 1899, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology — the chair once held by Whitney, who had taken him to Colorado as a student. He founded the Association of American Geographers in 1904 and served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1911.

He also became, belatedly, a famous teacher. He lectured with an intensity that students remembered for decades, and drew his complex block diagrams on the blackboard ambidextrously, both hands working at once. He was preoccupied by the inaccessibility of his subject, complaining that it was "as much a sealed book to the person of ordinary intelligence and education as…a great cathedral would be to a backwoodsman." His textbooks shaped physical geography curricula around the world for close to a century.

He retired from Harvard in 1912 and did not stop. Shaken by the First World War and by the deaths of his first and then his second wife, he married a third time, lectured widely, and held appointments at the University of Arizona and Caltech. In his eighties he produced major work on the origins of coral reefs and on erosion in deserts, along coastlines and in limestone caverns — more printed pages and drawings as an octogenarian, one account observes, than most scholars manage in a whole career. He died in 1934.

Why William Is Called a Genius

The specific ability was synthesis under conditions of overwhelming data: taking decades of disconnected description and finding the single organising idea that made all of it legible. He was, in one appraisal, "the first to give qualitative coherence to a field awash in decades of disconnected descriptions." That is a rarer act than discovery. The observations already existed, scattered across survey reports; what did not exist was the frame that turned them into a sequence with a direction.

The second gift was pedagogical, and should not be treated as lesser. A theory that cannot be taught does not propagate, and Davis's ambidextrous blackboard diagrams and his textbook prose were what carried the cycle of erosion into classrooms on several continents. Making a discipline visible to non-specialists was, for him, an explicit and stated ambition.

The counter-case is serious. Davis's model was eventually attacked — including by his successors in his own Harvard department — for ignoring the erosional roles of climate, underlying geology, physical process, the marine environment and changes in global sea level. More damagingly, critics charged that his deductive determinism conflated model with observation: having decided what the stages must be, he found them. Dogmatism is the word that has attached to him. Walther Penck's rival scheme challenged him directly, though modern tectonic theory has made the two look more complementary than opposed.

There is a darker charge as well. Davis advanced scientific racism in his geographical writing; his 1902 textbook contained statements of racial hierarchy and used environmental determinism to justify inequalities between peoples. This was not incidental to his method — it was the same deductive habit, applied where it did enormous harm, and it belongs in any honest account of him.

Legacy

The cycle of erosion is no longer taught as the truth about how landscapes form. It is still taught, because in its elegant simplicity it remains the clearest way to introduce the idea that a landscape has a history and is going somewhere. Modern geomorphology, with its quantitative process studies and its tectonics, is largely a set of corrections to Davis — which is another way of saying it is built on the foundation he laid. The Association of American Geographers, which he founded in 1904, remains the professional home of the discipline he did more than anyone to establish in the United States.

Achievements

• Penrose Medal
• Vega Medal
• Patron’s Medal
• Hayden Memorial Geological Award
• Recorded as geologist, geographer and writer