THE ROLE OF ANALYSIS IN SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION.

Introduction Custom decrees that the Chairman of your Section should, at the interval of a year following his presidency, deliver before you an appropriate address. It has seemed to me that I could best command your interest in some field of discussion where every one of us, geographer and geologist alike, has had experience. So I have selected the broad field connoted by the highly inclusive term, “scientific investigation”; and I would direct your attention, not to any particular results of such investigation, but to a concrete problem of method which I suppose must concern every scientific worker. This problem can briefly be stated as follows: What is the precise role analysis in a properly conceived and successfully executed scientific investigation? To answer such a question it is obvious that we must first determine, as best we may, what constitutes “a properly conceived and successfully executed scientific investigation.” The early . . .