- 1 The meaning of “morphology” is clearly defined in the Oxford Dictionary. It is derived from the Greek words morphe (form) and logos (studies). Biologists, philologists, and others use it to mean form studies, and within the subject of geomorphology its meaning may be logically restricted to surface-form studies. It should not be synonymous with geomorphology and a morphological map should represent surface form only. If some other aspect, or classification, or interpretation of the earth's surface is shown the map becomes, for example, either a geological, or a soils, or a morphographic, or a morphogenetic map. It is appropriate here to define also the meanings of the words landform and land form as they are used in this article. A landform is a feature of the earth's surface with distinctive form characters which can be attributed to the dominance of particular processes or particular structures in the course of its development and to which the feature can be clearly related. On the other hand land form (two words) means only the form of the land. I am responsible for the definition of the technique but I owe a great deal to the helpful criticisms of my colleagues in the British Geomorphological Research Group and, above all, to Mr. G. M. Lewis, Mr. I. S. Maxwell, Mr. J. L. H. Sibbons, and Dr. A. Straw, of the Department of Geography of the University of Sheffield, and to Professor R. S. Waters, now of the Department of Geography of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, who have given much time and thought to the problem of defining the geometry of the land surface. I gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance that made the development of this technique possible and which was provided by the Research Fund of the University of Sheffield. I also acknowledge with gratitude the financial assistance provided by Professor B. J. Garnier from the travel fund of the Department of Geography of the University College of Ibadan, Nigeria, for the fieldwork in West Africa during which the map in Figure 10 was compiled. I am indebted to the Editor of the Zeitschrift für Geomor-phologie, for permission to reproduce this map which first appeared in Supplementband I; Contributions Internationales à la Morphologie des Versants (1960). I am also indebted to Mr. J. E. Hall and Mr. H. Walkland of the Department of Geography of the University of Sheffield, for their help in devising and drawing the diagrams. Their contributions are gratefully acknowledged.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Volume 55, 1965 - Issue 3