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66 the ‘nature’ of geographyHowever, Hartshorne’s synthetic sensibilities were soon challenged byothers seeking to beef-up the emerging ‘systematic’ (i.e. topical) branchesof geography at the expense of the regionalists. Among the key contributionshere were those of Bagnold, Horton and Strahler, on the physicalside, and that of Fredric Schaefer in relation to both human and physicalgeography. What these contributions did was accentuate the mildpre-war tendencies towards topical specialisation in geography. More thanthis, they also sought to make geography not the study of regionsor human–environment relations but, rather, a spatial science.This was clearestin Schaefer’s (1953) attack on Hartshorne. An economist by training anda German émigré who’d been interned by the Nazis, Schaefer wasinfluenced by the Vienna School in the 1930s.This school sought to establishwhat science is. Finding himself in Iowa University’s geography departmentafter the war, Schaefer believed that geography could be a science in thesame way that physics or chemistry were sciences. But what was a science?And what would distinguish geography from other sciences? Schaefer’sanswer was that all science is based on careful empirical observation, hasexplanation as its goal and its ultimate quest is the identification of generallaws that underlie the behaviour of all sorts of different phenomena (likethe law of gravity). In the case of geography, Schaefer saw its role asexplaining the spatial patterning of human and physical phenomena.As he put it:‘Geography has to be conceived as the science concerned withthe formulation of the laws governing the spatial distribution of certainfeatures on the earth’s surface’ (1953: 227). Geography was thus to bedefined, once more, not by its subject matter – which it shared with otherdisciplines – but by its perspective (the spatial distribution of things) (seeBox 2.2).In the same spirit as Schaefer’s intervention, several other critics withenvironmental interests paved the way for a physical geography based onprecise measurement and whose goal was the identification of the generalprocesses producing landforms, water courses, soil profiles, vegetativecommunities and climatic and weather patterns. Bagnold’s (1941) The Physicsof Blown Sand and Desert Dunes inquired into process-form connectionsin arid environments (Bagnold’s British military service had been in drylandregions). R.E. Horton (1945) used his engineering background toargue that the action of water over and through different types of soil androck had consistent physical consequences that could be empiricallymeasured – and even predicted. Finally, Strahler’s (1952) ‘Dynamic basis of