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The question of whether geography is an art or a science is discussed within the context of comments made by Steiner about the current state of literary criticism. Several problems of geographic development parallel this situation. Problems of translation go beyond the common meaning of the word, and include questions of teaching and public communication. Mapping is seen as a fundamental act of human enquiry. The lack of even elementary mathematical training has severe consequences, because new perspectives are difficult to achieve. These are illustrated by the work of Wilson, with analogies drawn from Monod.

The recent intellectual revolution in Geography rests upon men and machines. The latter have extended the scope and size of geographic investigations with a speed unthinkable only a decade ago. Statistical exploration is possible on a large scale, and taxonomic procedures have advanced greatly. Peculiarly geographic questions of spatial autocorrelation and pattern measurement can only be investigated with the aid of large and very fast machines. Optical computers are used for fast, parallel computation to obtain the spectra of spatial series. Cartography at advanced levels is increasingly automated, and advances in remote sensing require further extensions of automatic data processing and display. Optimization and simulation models are used routinely today for instructional purposes.

Political, social, and economic development take place in space as well as time, but all too often they are written about and studied as though they existed at a point, which, it will be recalled, has position and no magnitude. In a sense, all social scientists are historians, and use the temporal dimension as a framework within which to examine the political, social, and economic behaviour of men. But few feel comfortable trying on the geographer's spatial shoes, and, beyond an occasional location map, hesitate to examine the developments in the dimension that is his particular concern. Part of the trouble, of course, is that the map imposes a stricter discipline upon us than we care to admit: to map anything beyond the merely trivial we have to measure it, while fuzzy but intuitively valid ideas such as economic development, political power, and social integration make us coy, or evoke surprisingly emotional responses that such things are incapable of being measured in any meaningful fashion. But, whether we like it or not, developments of all kinds do take place in space; what, then, can the geographer, with his spatial perspective, contribute to our knowledge of these things?

(1974). Diffusion in an Urban Hierarchy: The Case of Rotary Clubs. Economic Geography: Vol. 50, Studies in Spatial Diffusion Processes: I. Empirical, pp. 333-340.

(1970). Is Statistix Inferens the Geographical Name for A Wild Goose? Economic Geography: Vol. 46, PROCEEDINGS International Geographical Union Commission on Quantitative Methods, pp. 439-448.