looked at the dusty high-road which he must presently pass along, he told himself that she was just simply waiting for him somewhere and not so very far off, either. She was waiting in the place that should be their home, getting it ready, standing at the gate-doing for him all the sweet things which, as an earthly wife, she never could do.

He went out of the gate. He felt acutely in the small of his back that somewhere there was a secretly lifted corner to a drawn white blind, and that

he was being not only watched but criticized and commented upon by her children. Those men and women, her children, were unfriendly. He wondered if her five girls were in the least like her. And he thought-given a chancethat he could have made them love him. For how could they be strange with him when they were her children? Yet the very house hated him. To-morrow they would carry her out of it. He was glad; for then he would feel at last that she was wholly his.

IF

[F we had before us a map of the world showing what is known of its surface forms and other geographical features, on a uniform scale so large that all essential detail should stand out for us to read, we might justly regard it as a monumental achievement, a blessing conferred upon us by modern civilization. It would give a true and clear picture of our earth as far as we have studied its aspects. With the hundreds of sheets drawn on the same map projection and scale, using the same system of colors and other symbols to express facts, it would be easy to compare every land surface with every other and to note all their similarities and contrasts. The map would be a short cut to accurate geographical information, made ready for the use of all peoples.

We shall have such a map before a great many years. The leading nations are co-operating to produce it. The work is advancing every day even in lands that are remote. In July this year plans were published in Germany showing that thirteen contiguous sheets of the map, on the scale and projection selected, have been made by European governments of parts of Russian and Chinese Turkestan, Persia, and Afghanistan; twenty-two sheets of parts of China, Korea, French Indo-China, and Japan; and eight sheets covering the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles. These are not the finished sheets, but are the basis upon which the rules adopted by the International Conference in London in November, 1909, as to coloration, the spelling of place names, and other details, will be expressed to make them strictly conform with all the other sheets in the great standard map of the world. France and Great Britain are mapping their African colonies on the required scale. Dr. Henry Gannett, Geographer of the United States Geological Survey, has prepared a number of these sheets, embracing parts VOL. CXXIV.-No. 740.-30

of our Eastern, Central, and Western States; and he was a prime mover in the convening of the London International Conference that at last placed the project upon a practical basis.

The idea of a standard map of the world was first proposed by Prof. Albrecht Penck at the International Geographical Congress, Bern, in 1891. He clearly showed the advantages that would result if the nations should co-operate in producing a world map on the comparatively large scale of one-millionth (1:1,000,000), or 15.8 statute miles to an inch. The project was heartily approved by this and later congresses, committees were appointed to promote the movement, and Great Britain, Germany, and France began to make maps on the required scale. Little practical progress, however, was made till after Dr. Gannett reported that our government could not publish the sheets he was preparing because no agreement had been reached as to the color scheme and other essential details. No general plan had been adopted for the uniform production of these mapsheets. He therefore presented, through Dr. Day, of Washington, a recommendation to the International Geographical Congress at Geneva, in 1908, to appoint a commission to work out a uniform plan for producing the map.

This plan was prepared by the Geneva Congress, and it was decided to submit it to a conference of the map-making nations, which was accordingly convened by the British government in London, in November, 1909. The conference was completely successful, its decisions were final, and the map-makers of all nations were at last in a position to co-operate in carrying out the plan.

This fortunate result involved mutual concessions, but the plan as perfected was heartily and unanimously adopted. Greenwich is to be the initial meridian. The metric scale for distances and for

altitudes above sea-level will be used, but nations not employing metric measurements may add in parentheses their equivalents in miles, feet, versts, and so

on.

The symbols adopted to represent rivers, rail and other roads, towns, etc., practically include all the conventions used by the United States Geological Survey on its topographic survey-sheets. The Latin alphabet alone will be used, and spellings are to be those of the official maps of each country. We shall see Roma, not Rome; Wien, not Vienna; and the rule will discourage the tendency of German map-makers to spell the name of our greatest city "Neu York." The spelling of Chinese place names will be that of the Imperial Post and Customs Service, whose maps and Yellow Books give both the Chinese characters and their equivalent in Latin type.

It was not easy to harmonize the various methods employed by different nations to show the forms of the earth's surface, such as mountains, valleys, hills, and plains. On our government surveysheets horizontal lines, called contours, are advantageously used. Each line represents a definite elevation above sealevel; and according to the distances between the contours the map-reader may get a clear idea as to the angle of slope. On the one-millionth map these contours will be used, but they must be generalized, because the scale will be much smaller than those of topographical survey-sheets, and, while showing the general forms, much detail must be omitted; and to make the representation of surface forms all the clearer to the general public the contours will be reinforced by colors: shades of blue showing the depth of lakes and seas, three shades of green and one of buff showing the lower lands up to about one thousand feet, followed by tints of brown from light to dark up to heights of about ten thousand feet, and above this altitude violet and white will show the highest elevations of the world. Mr. Bailey Willis has recently indicated the coloration on the one-millionth sheets of the United States: tints of green and buff for the Atlantic slope and the Mississippi Valley, above which will rise the Appalachians in brown tones; brown tints for the high plains rising from the

Mississippi Valley to the Rockies; the violet symbol for high altitude, touching the top of the Western ranges with bands of color. The colors will crowd one another to the Pacific slope, indicating the rapid rise from the sea to mountain regions. It would take 2,642 of these sheets to cover the world on the onemillionth scale, but, as the oceans compose three-fourths of the earth's surface, it is probable that only those parts of the seas contiguous to the land or occupied by oceanic islands will be included in the map. The whole atlas is likely to embrace not over fifteen hundred sheets. It will be many times larger than any map of the world yet produced.

Dr. Gannett has sent us an outline map showing the progress made to September, 1911, with the sheets of the United States. The sheet covering Rhode Island, the eastern half of Massachusetts, the southern half of New Hampshire, and small parts of Connecticut and Maine was being engraved. The base maps were complete for Vermont, the remainder of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the whole of North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. The sheets for New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Mississippi, Montana, and Wyoming, and the southern half of Alabama were in various stages of completion. In other words, the work is far advanced or in progress in one-third of our area south of Canada. Doctor Gannett's sketch map shows that the United States will supply fifty-two sheets for the atlas, including the neighboring parts of Canada and Mexico and the bordering seas.

Eight of the great powers-AustriaHungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, Spain, and the United States--are now pledged to this standard map of the world by the unanimous conclusions of the London conference in which they participated. Other governments are coming into the scheme. In the past year Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela have announced their intention to supply the sheets of their respective territories. Europe has this advantage over other nations, that her detailed surveys are nearly completed.

map

The data are now available, and the production of the one-millionth map of Europe means only a financial arrangement between the governments concerned and the scientific map - publishing houses. Some governments, however, will produce their sheets in their own establishments. The Ordnance Survey of Great Britain is about to issue a number of the sheets. Progress will be slower in other parts of the world, because many of the mother-maps," as the detailed survey-sheets are called, are yet to be produced. The one-millionth map, however, will not wait for the completion of the mother-maps. Prussia has already mapped eastern China on this scale; and Germany and Great Britain in Africa, Russia in Turkestan, and France in Africa and the Antilles have produced many sheets. Even the best sheets must be revised from time to time as new truth is learned, new towns and routes are located, and nature and man change the facts of geography. The great fact is that this project contemplates the production of a map for all peoples that will scientifically present the truth about the world's surface as far as it has been made known, clearly differentiating between what is known and what has not yet been adequately revealed. If the work in our country continues to be forwarded with the present energy, it is likely that the one-millionth sheets of the United States will be completed and published within the next decade.

A scale of 1:1,000,000 means simply that a line of any length on the map is equivalent to 1,000,000 times that length on the ground. In other words, one inch on the map represents nearly sixteen miles in nature. This scale is large enough for most purposes. On the fiftytwo sheets of the United States, for example, which will doubtless be sold at bare cost, our people will have a map of the country several times larger than any they have ever seen. It will give a generalization of the forms of the mountains and valleys, high and low plains, the drainage systems, towns, hamlets, railroads, the more important common roads, etc.; also a good idea of the elevation of all land surfaces and the depths of the lakes and adjacent oceans. Any one who has a fair conception of the size

of our States may impose, for example, the sheet giving Texas upon the sheets showing France or the Belgian Congo, and he will at once have an approximate notion of the size of these far-away regions.

The value of the map to our people is likely to be more important than to those of a number of the leading nations, because we have not yet reached in our school geographies and in the output of our map-publishing houses the standards of map-making now maintained in most European and some other countries. But when the one-millionth map comes into our homes we shall find it a superior product which will accustom us to good maps, whose every line, dot, color, or other symbolism is meant to convey definite information. We shall learn to discriminate between such maps and those that are unworthy because they give so much misleading information. Not till we as a nation attain this ability to judge between a good and a poor map shall we be able to demand and to obtain the facilities for profitable map study that are enjoyed in the humblest homes of many countries.

Map-making is very old, and has been practised by the most primitive peoples for many ages. Rude scratches on many rocks in South America are now interpreted as maps. East Greenland natives carve maps out of wood; American Indians make map-sketches on birch and other barks; the Marshall Islanders charted the sailing routes along their coasts long before they knew of the white man; the desert nomad sketches maps in the sand to illustrate his wanderings, and nearly every primitive tribe to-day makes maps to show routes to hunting-grounds, animal paths, fisheries, fords, etc. They know as well as we do that maps are practically a human necessity; but we know further that a good map often places before our eyes an amount of accurate geographical information that might take many months to dig out of books. We may cite a map of Africa, now over twenty years old, the largest of that continent produced up to 1890. Hermann Habenicht, the compiler, ransacked the literature of African exploration to find what each traveler wrote about the nature of the regions along his

route; and the map showed these routes, and marked along them the forest, grassy, sandy, or tillable stretches, the water resources, native settlements, and much other information gleaned by pioneer explorers. The map was a time-saver for students, a fine epitome of some phases of the work done by many men over a long series of years. The leading geographers use the perfected map of to-day as much as they do books, and often more. Dr. Hermann Wagner, for example, has said that maps were his largest dependence in the production of his great Lehrbuch der Geographie.

But though map-making is very old, the kinds of maps most useful now have not very long been made. The atlases of a century ago did not contain a tithe of the information now expressed on atlas-sheets. Two generations ago the maps used in European schools gave little more than a few geographical outlines, such as coasts, political boundaries, rivers, and place names; sometimes a few scratches to represent mountains, but not always. It was only sixty-three years ago that Emil Sydow published in Germany the first edition of his school atlas, in which he introduced the revolutionary idea that school maps should tell children something more of geography than the positions of coasts, waters, towns, and boundaries. Maps should picture as well the mountains, valleys, and plains. Cartographic expression should be given to the land forms, and maps should help the teacher to show what the surface of the earth is really like.

This fundamental idea has ever since been steadily developing. Map symbolism has wonderfully grown, till it is today fully adequate for the graphic expression of a large variety of facts; and, best of all, the European map-makers, by their use of contours of elevation, hachures, colors, and light and shade effects, have so perfected methods of showing the diverse forms of the earth's surface that even on a small-scale map of the Swiss Alps, for example, we may see before us the wonderful complex of high mountains, deep valleys, snow-fields, and glaciers. We may see the birthplace of the Rhine, whose glacial brooklets issue from an ice mass high up on the slopes; the little lake perched far

above the valley in a small depression filled by the melting ice of the great Rhone glacier. These atlas-sheets are small, and nature is large; but the fine art of generalizing land forms has been so perfected by European cartographers that, though a great many details must be omitted, still the essentials of form are preserved, so that he who knows how to read maps may easily find the essential truth in the map picture.

The scientific map, so faithfully depict. ing the manifold aspects of the earth, has helped us to an interesting discovery. We know now that while the great object of geography is to describe the earth's surface, language alone is insufficient for this purpose. Only in the most general terms can speech draw a picture of the face of the earth. If we go into detail and try in words to give a complete description, the picture is vague and the mind cannot fully grasp it. The geographical description must always be associated with the map picture in order to impress upon the mind a clear and orderly idea of the various phases of the earth's surface.

Naturally, a fine map cannot give its greatest service to the man who does not know how to read it. Unfortunately map-reading is taught very little in our own schools; and the first-class map material that alone supplies the wide range of geographical facts, accurately and clearly expressed for the student's map study, is not often seen in our classrooms. The result is that as a nation we are not skilful map-readers. Several years ago our government topographic survey completed eight sheets, embracing most of the Catskill Mountain region. Here was an opportunity to use these map-sheets of a bit of our country embracing considerable variety of topographic form to show how finely all this information might be generalized on a map-sheet of ordinary atlas size. It would be an object-lesson to our people, most of whom seldom see the mothermaps produced by our Government Survey. It would show the hundred thousand or more summer sojourners who annually visit the Catskills how much and how varied is the information that can be truthfully and clearly expressed on a small-scale atlas-sheet.