An important area of guitar education, whether in a private studio or a public school classroom, is that of guitar "fingering"--the exact, well-planned, and deliberate designation of fingers to a musical passage. Knowledge, understanding, and application of basic fingering principles will aid students in such parameters as technical proficiency, expression, phrasing, memorization, and performance security. This dissertation supplies the teacher with a theoretical basis from which to present this important topic. The basis is built on two sets of principles: (1) the physical properties of the guitar and its tone production (guitar size, distance between the frets, sustaining quality of the strings, and varying timbre of the strings), and (2) the physiological structure of the human hand and arm (length of the fingers, alignment of hands with the strings, strong and weak finger combinations, changing positions, fatigue, and string...