Geography i s an integrative discipline to which society has assigned responsibility for the study of areas. It i s expected to satisfy human curiosity about how much of what i s where, and why it is there, in an organized manner that will focilitate comprehension and retention. Geography must be both an art and a science, because understanding the meaning of area cannot be reduced to a formal process. The discipline deals with an enormous range of phenomena and must provide a congenial home for many different Ikinds of practitioners. Geography has survived repeated misguided attempts to "make it into a Science" by amputating vital parts of the discipline. Systematic geography generates theories to facilitate an understanding of regions, and regional geography is the proving ground where theories are tested empirically. The idea of the region provides the essential unifying theme that integrates the diverse subdisciplines of geography. The highest form of the geographer's art i s the production of evocative descriptions that facilitate an understanding and an appreciation of regions. Regions are subjective artistic devices. Regional geography must be informed by a sense of time, and it cannot ignore the physical environment. It begins with the visible features of the earth's surface, but quickly transcends them and attempts to understand the values that motivate the human behavior that i s related to them. Exploration, or fieldwork, i s a basic research technique in geography, and the most geographic hypotheses are generated by field observation and by cartographic analysis. Effective communication i s a difficult and demanding art that regional geographers must master. The frontiers of regional geography lie in our great cities.OCIETY has allocated responsibility for the S study of areas to geography; this responsibility is the justification for our existence as a scholarly discipline. ' Most people are inherently curious, and they want to Iknow more about the world in toward the improvement of an early draft of this essay, and the patient good humor with which Margaret Rasmussen typed and retyped it.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review. ABSTRACT.New agricultural technology has transformed the Corn Belt from a mixed crop-and-livestock-farming area to a highly specialized cash-grain-farming area. The rural landscape has been greatly modified, but the family farm remains the norm. Its acreage has doubled, but the size of farms still reflects the size of parcels purchased by original settlers from the federal government. Increased farm production requires an export outlet, but global recession and a strong dollar have reduced exports, depressed prices below costs of production, and created serious problems even for the very best farm managers.T HE Corn Belt is in turmoil. Its traditional system of mixed farming, which had flourished for almost 150 years, has been replaced since World War II by highly specialized types of agriculture. The rural landscape has been modified accordingly. Mixed farming is based on an ecologically sound integration of crops and livestock and should not be confused with "general farming," which is a bureaucratic euphemism for a catchall category of miscellaneous types of farming that are too difficult to classify. A farmer who practices mixed farming may sell some of his crops for cash, but he feeds most of them to fattening animals or to workstock on the farm, and he returns manure from the animals to the soil to maintain its fertility for crop production.The concept of mixed farming was part of the agricultural revolution in Europe. German-speaking farmers brought the concept to southeastern Pennsylvania long before the Revolutionary War, and in the early 1800s their descendants transplanted it to the Miami valley of southwestern Ohio, which was the seedbed of the Corn Belt. The farming system that developed in the Miami valley was based on a three-year rotation of corn, a small grain (either wheat or oats), and hay. Farmers on better ground might extend that rotation to more than three years by growing two or more crops of corn before they planted their small grain, and cultivators on steep or hilly land might leave their fields in hay for several years before plowing them to plant corn. Nevertheless, the basic rotation of corn, small grains, and hay was the key to the cropping system in the Corn Belt.A farmer normally sold his wheat for cash, and he fed his oats and hay to livestock. He had a welcome option in marketing his corn. He could sell it for cash if the price of corn was high, or he could use it as a concentrated feed to fatten hogs and cattle. He was carefully attuned to fluctuations in * A single-quarter leave from the University of Minnesota facilitated ...

The loss and abandonment of agricultural land in thirty-one states of the eastern United States has been more widespread than is commonly recognized. Changes in the acreage of cleared farm land provide a better indication of farm land loss and abandonment than changes in the total acreage of farm land, because of geographical and historical variations in the acreage of farm woodland. Eight areas in the East experienced especially heavy losses of cleared farm land between 1910 and 1959. No single statistical indicator provides a satisfactory explanation of the complex geographical patterns of loss and abandonment. Although urban expansion is a major cause for the permanent loss of cleared farm land, and despite its importance on the fringes of metropolitan areas, it is but one of many factors which influence loss and abandonment. Strip mining and the loss of a locally dominant crop have been important factors in certain areas, The Soil Bank program has had its greatest impact upon land of intermediate quality. Land acquisition by forest industry companies has borne little relationship to the loss and abandonment of farm land. In the East as a whole it appears that physical hindrances to effective agriculture have been the most important factor influencing the loss and abandonment of cleared farm land.HE frontier tradition of taming the wilder-

Background: The literature pertaining to chiropractic students' opinions with respect to the desired future status of the chiropractic physician is limited and is an appropriate topic worthy of study. A previous pilot study was performed at a single chiropractic college. This current study is an expansion of this pilot project to collect data from chiropractic students enrolled in colleges throughout North America. Objective: The purpose of this study is to investigate North American chiropractic students' opinions concerning professional identity, role and future. Methods: A 23-item cross-sectional electronic questionnaire was developed. A total of 7,455 chiropractic students from 12 North American English-speaking chiropractic colleges were invited to complete the survey. Survey items encompassed demographics, evidence-based practice, chiropractic identity and setting, and scope of practice. Data were collected and descriptive statistical analysis was performed.