The Relative Relief of Ohio

THE configuration of the surface is one of the most obvious features of any landscape unless obscured by a mantle of vegetation. Whatever agencies and processes may have caused the sculpturing or the construction of the land forms, it is the resulting configuration that is the principal consideration of the topographer and the geographer. The former is concerned chiefly with the surveying and depicting of the surface and the latter with an analysis and interpretation of the landscape features. For purposes of empirical description the configuration may be resolved into the fundamental elements of altitude above sea level or some other datum, degree and direction of slope, local relief, texture, and pattern. Among these elements altitude above sea level has attained a place in geography out of proportion to its importance. The precise altitude of single peaks, for instance, is of far less importance than relative altitude that gives regional character to the physical landscape. Despite its obvious importance, little attention has been paid to slope in the analysis of land forms, though the ordinary topographic map contains the necessary information for such study.' Exception must be made of the detailed topographic and chorographic studies that have lately been engaging a number of American geographers.2 It is not possible to cover the whole earth, a single continent, or even a major geographic region with a mosaic of detailed topographic studies; our main dependence must be on larger-scale methods; but if macroscopic methods are to replace microscopic techniques, whatever quantitative devices are available in the investigations should be retained. For the detailed analysis of slope will be substituted an investigation of relative relief that will take slope into account and yet will not require the precise field methods of the surveyor. Relief is not strictly a function of elevation above sea level, yet there is a relation between altitude and the local relief.3 The area in