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The article presents titles and abstracts of papers submitted at a meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1938. The paper "The Sequent Occupance of a Boston Suburban Community," presented by Edward A. Ackerman focuses on areas surrounding the Boston metropolitan district. The proximity of a large city market, plots of level land and fertile soil determine the existence of these suburban fanning communities. The article "The Recession of Victoria Falls," by Wallace W. Atwood. The world famous falls on the Zainbesi have had a strange and remarkable history in recession. The gorge is serpentine with many curious off-shoots, and located on the floor of a broad and much older flat-bottomed valley. Today the water tumbles over a ledge, fully a mile in length, and into a very narrow chasm 350 ft. deep.

The built forms of New York City and Boston differed dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper focuses on the changing forms of their retail districts and evaluates the divergence in those patterns in relation to their socioeconomic context. Historical atlases and city directories identified the locations of department stores, which were used as indicators of the retail districts while primary and secondary historical sources related locational decisions to their economic position and the structure of their elite classes. New York's unstable elite classes continued to move their residences north on Manhattan Island throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and were unable and unwilling to stop the northward expansion of the retail district. Boston's stable ruling class was able to control retail expansion through various political acts limiting development and through social barriers that limited displays of conspicuous consumption. The importance of the structure of elite classes in mediating the processes of land allocation suggests that findings of New York, as a city of competitive capitalism with a splintered elite, and Boston, as a city of controlled capitalism with a ruling elite, might provide a useful framework for understanding the specific contexts within other urban built forms.

Ralph Stocliman Tarr was born on January 15, 1864, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He died, after a brief illness, at his home in Ithaca, March 21, 1919, being a little more than forty-eight years of age. On graduation from the high school in 1881, Tarr's interest in science led him to enter the summer school of the Peabody Academy at Salem. He accomplished much work on the geology of Cape Ann, a problem which he says was much too big for his experience. It may in truth be said, however, that the report on that region published in the Ninth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey is substantially Tarr's work.

Displays illustrating papers and graphic expositions not correlated with sessions have become an integral part of annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers. Exhibits at Cambridge, Massachusetts accented physical geography rather more and human geography rather less than has been the case in recent preceding years. In a number of cases comparable maps of physical and human phenomena were displayed side by side. This appears to indicate a pronounced interest in regional correspondence of phenomena.

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Features of the physical urban site merit more attention than they have traditionally received in models of city form, but in bestowing it the interrelation of social and natural features must be recognized and a neoenvironmental determinism avoided that would see the roles played by site features as always and everywhere the same. In American cities today, the affluence of residents, as a rule, increases with elevation. Yet in the “walking city” of the nineteenth century and earlier, high land's difficulty of access might have outweighed its attractions and made it the home of the poor and not the rich. The possibility is investigated through a study of upland residential patterns in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1891, just before the city's first electric trolley line was installed. Though a simple inversion of today's pattern did not appear, working-class residents indeed predominated on the highest land. They shared it with pockets of upper-class estates and with other land uses—such as parks, large residential institutions, and extractive and nuisance industries—typically associated with the premodern horizontal urban fringe and apparently drawn to the vertical fringe as well by the cheapness of land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information related to geographer Frederic Putnam Gulliver. After preparatory schooling at the Norwich Free Academy, Gulliver entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1883 and studied mining engineering until 1886. For the last two years of his graduate study, he was closely associated with the writer in an investigation of "Shoreline Topography" which he had chosen for a thesis and to which he gave the most persevering and successful attention. On completing his graduate studies, he received a Harvard Travelling fellowship and passed a year in Europe, where he spent the fall semester at the University of Berlin under von Richthofen, and the spring semester at the University of Vienna.

Abbott Lawrence Rotch was born in Boston, January 6, 1861. He was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.B.) in 1884. From 1888 to 1891, and again from 1902 to 1906, he held the appointment of assistant in meteorology at Harvard, a position which involved no teaching and in which no salary was paid. In 1906 he was appointed professor of meteorology, an honor which he prized very highly, and which gave him the position on the teaching staff of the university to which he was in every way fully entitled. He was the first professor of meteorology who has occupied that position at Harvard, and he served in this professorship without pay.