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This paper may be regarded as a first short step into a scheme of systematic geography, since it deals with an island off a young coastal plain that is Shriharikota, Madras, India. The island is probably the simplest part of the simplest type of land form. Moreover, its inhabitants, simple jungle folk, are in the most elemental stage of evolution. The island has the monsoon type of climate. The East Coast of India presents to the Bay of Bengal a shoreline backed. except in a few places, with a monotonously low relief. If one braves the tulmultous shallow inshore waters of the bay from the city Calcutta to Cape Comorin his typical view is of a silver strand surmounted by jungle growth.

The article explores the process of survey research in India with a focus on the field experience in Madras State of India. Many expectations on which social science, particularly the opinion survey, has flourished in the United States do not hold for a country like India is not startling, but this fact warrants careful examination in terms of its consequences for further research. The responses of both sophisticated and unsophisticated Indians to the opinion survey reveal that certain familiar assumptions may not be operative in an underdeveloped country. In choosing the urban sample, authors first made a systematic selection of areas by choosing ten polling stations from the hundreds into which all cities are divided. This is not to deny that individual opinion in the United States is not also often a function of group opinion, of a process which is social, not merely individual. Authors say that in the area of objectives, their experience indicates that some of the questions which the opinion survey can answer in the West can be better answered, at least for the present, by the anthropologist using methods of clinical observation.