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the ‘nature’ of geography 61could be directly explained in terms of the physical environment. Like Boas,Sauer was influenced by the seminal work of the European philosopherWilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey, departing from the extension of Darwin’s ideasto the human realm, distinguished between the ‘sciences of nature’ and the‘sciences of man’.The former, he argued, sought explanations of a more orless orderly natural world.The latter, by contrast, took human culture andthinking as their subject matter and thus quested more for understanding.In effect, Dilthey drove an ontological wedge between people andenvironment: because they were different orders of reality they needed, Diltheymaintained, to be studied in different ways. Building on this, and on Boas’sand Kroeber’s commitment to fieldwork over sweeping theoreticalgeneralisations, Sauer published his influential essay ‘The morphology oflandscape’ in 1925. In it he defined geography’s subject matter not ashuman–environment relationships but, rather, as the visible consequencesof people’s actions upon the landscape. His kind of cultural ecology orcultural landscape study took it as axiomatic that people routinely ‘transform. . . the natural landscape into a cultural landscape’ (Sauer cited inLivingstone 1992: 297). But unlike Marsh, Sauer was not much interestedin the destructive, epochal transformations wrought by industrial societies– at least not until later in his career. Rather, his empirically driven, ratheratheoretical agenda focused on rural and historical landscapes in all of theircultural particularity. This no doubt reflected the influence of Boas andKroeber, who were fascinated with non-Western peoples past and present.In the work of Sauer and his many students, geography was presented asa ‘chorological discipline’ that examined ‘culture areas’ in which differentnatural landscapes were slowly transformed by different peoples in differentways. Morally, Sauer’s landscape morphology possessed none of theabsolutism of the environmental determinists and exhibited the generosity– the celebration of geographical difference and particularity – found in theregionalism of Geddes, Fleure and the later Herbertson.If Sauer’s work inclined more to the human side of the people–environment relationship, this did not mean that ‘human geography’ wasyet a recognised part of the discipline.To be sure, some regional geographersstudied the human dimensions of a territory more than its physical ones(e.g. Fleure 1919). Meanwhile, others studied single human aspectsof regions, and this is how both economic (or ‘commercial’) and politicalgeography came into being. Mackinder, for instance, was fascinated withhow the world’s physical geography influenced inter-state relations – both