Davis, William Morris

William Morris Davis, (born Feb. 12, 1850, Philadelphia—died Feb. 5, 1934, Pasadena, Calif., U.S.), U.S. geographer, geologist, and meteorologist who founded the science of geomorphology, the study of landforms.

In 1870 he began three years of service as a meteorologist with the Argentine Meteorological Observatory, Córdoba. In 1876 he obtained a position with Harvard University, where he taught until 1912. His meteorological studies gave rise to Elementary Meteorology (1894), which was used as a college text for more than 30 years.

In the 1870s his interest turned to the study of landforms, and the publication of “The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania” (1889) laid the foundation for the Davisian system of landscape analysis, perhaps his most significant contribution to physical geography. In this work, he proposed that the physical features of the land are the result of a long, continued, orderly change by means of erosion and that this sequential change through time constituted a cycle of erosion, which he thought vital in understanding present-day landscape and geological history.

After his retirement in 1912, Davis served as a visiting lecturer to many universities, devoted much time to writing and field studies, and conducted exhaustive studies of coral reefs and coral islands. The results of these studies appeared in The Coral Reef Problem (1928).

His more than 500 published works include Physical Geography (1898), Geographical Essays (1909), and “Origin of Limestone Caverns” (1930).