T HE scientific contribution of economic geography was once summed up by Isaiah Bowman in these words: Few 'commercial geographers' in the United States have written analytical monographs in their field or made a discovery or framed a generalization not already commonly accepted. To qualify in the subject seems only to require the ability to provide a new arrangement of facts and to write almost purely descriptive text.' Although this was written as an apology for the discipline, it can also be read as a devastating criticism. That the condition still persists, and universally, may be surmised from Griffith Taylor's omission of a chapter on the subject in his recent review of geography.2 Jean Gottmann3 has made an eloquent plea for a new approach in economic geography that will focus on process and bypass the vagueness of possibilism, which leaves too wide a zone of uncertainty in studying causal relationships. We must look for an analytical method for social phenomena that can be founded on basic features and general principles. Brunhes4 was one of the leaders of the possibilist school, and yet he too urged social geographers to aim at conclusions more independent of local variability. It is the purpose of this article to present a new approach to various aspects of economic geography, an approach which is scientific and which can contribute toward the solution of major commercial and social problems. Perhaps it would not be too exaggerated a claim to say that such an approach constitutes the most powerful analytical tool yet available to us. By means of it, horizons for further work can be opened up and a bridge established between geography, climatology, botany, and economics. The spatial relations of economic activities, the special field of economic geographers, are intimately bound up with time relations. Numerous examples spring to mind. Two farming districts with the same costs of pro-