The author retired from the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center in St. Louis, Missouri (now, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency). Most of his career was spent as an instructor training qualified personnel in the field of Cartography. He taught a wide range of subjects in a cartographic curriculum including image recognition as an integral phase of the mapping process. In cartographic literature, image recognition is generally referred to as a related and/or associated group called the Fundamental Recognition Elements . This term will be used throughout the exposition. It is the objective of this publication to demonstrate that the essence of these elements existed in Holmes’ methodology of detection long before they became formalized and added to cartographic and photogrammetric disciplines.