JN the extraordinary constellation of brilliant talents that France displayed under the reign of Louis XIV, Marshal Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban is outstanding. This man, who renewed the art of siege and fortification in all its ramifications, reveals in his writings an amazing variety of interests and knowledge. He has been considered the father of modem military engineering. The French defensive system he organized functioned with relatively slight changes for two centuries after his death (I707). He has been called the builder of the frontiers of France and a forerunner of today's architects and agronomists. He was a great economist, inspirer of the physiocrats and proposer of an income tax of modern type.' Geographers, however, seem to have ignored Vauban, though he was one of the first to conduct studies of economic and regional geography by methods similar to those we employ nowadays, which in their turn owe something to direct inspiration from his work. It is not surprising that a man who "built frontiers" should be interested in geography. Vauban built not only land frontiers, after a careful study of topography, geological structure, communications, and so forth, but also maritime frontiers, which brought him in contact with the sea and problems of navigation and oversea trade. He worked on the fortifications of almost every large French port. Dunkirk, on the North Sea, and Sete, on the Mediterranean, are his creations. He also studied logistics and built canals, improved river navigation, and became deeply interested in all the details of the French economy. In addition to his classic books on military matters, he wrote a large number of papers, of which only a part have been published, under the general title of"Oisivetes."2 These "leisure hour" papers are, however, very businesslike: there is a memorandum on the Languedoc canal in which problems of trade, traffic, currency, mining, livestock raising, and wheat cultivation are considered; another memorandum studies the pig and hog raising; a third, river navigation; others treat fiscal and financial matters. A treatise on forestry shows Vauban's com-