314 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



(rreiit masters in their investigation have arisen whose hibours are win- 

 nini;- principles which are raising map-study into a science, are elevating 

 cartography into cartology. Moreover, there is ever^^ reason for believ- 

 ing that the methods and principles of cartographical study are as applic- 

 able to small as to large areas, and likely to lead to results relatively as 

 rich. In these days then, it is not necessary to explain what one can find 

 in maps to induce him to devote to them the most exhaustive possible 

 study, however wide or however limited may be the field of his interests. 



In addition to its more obvious and widely-recognized values, carto- 

 graphy is an unusually attractive study from the j^urely subjective point 

 of view. Not only do its materials often possess great intrinsic interest 

 from the beauty and intricacy of their wôrkmanship, and great attract- 

 iveness from the difficulty of their acquisition, but at the same time those 

 of any region taken collectively offer a fascinating study in evolution. 

 One who knows something of the influences at work in organic evolu- 

 tion may here find paralleled with curious and often startUng exact- 

 ness, the familiar phenomena of variation, adaptation and survival of the 

 fittest. He can see heredity, the old features, coming into conflict with 

 new knowledge, representative of environment, and the result of the 

 struggle is always a compromise, as it is in Nature. When heredity is 

 too strong for the environment to influence it, there results the persist- 

 ence of an old type, whose extinction is only the more certain in the end. 

 Selection, here the choice by men of the best, in the long run always pre- 

 serves the best adapted, i.e., the most accurate, which in its turn can be 

 replaced only by one yet better. The analogy fails in one respect, it is 

 true, in the sudden transition from one type to another ; but in most 

 respects it holds good. It is not needful to follow this subject farther, 

 but I may add that in some stages of this study I have been so much 

 influenced by the evolutionary aspect of this subject as to contemplate 

 classifying my maps, not under types as I have done, but into families, 

 genera and species, a plan which has been abandoned chiefly because of 

 practical difficulties in cari-ying it out. Or, looking at the subject from 

 another point of view, it is a matter of exti'eme interest to follow the 

 gradual crystallizing out of a given region from the great homogeneous 

 undifterentiated mass of which at first it is an unrecognizable part, and 

 to trace, in the light of its causes, the gradual unfolding of its outlines 

 and the definition of its boundaries. 



In this study I have viewed the whole subject from the standpoint 

 of local history, rather than from that of scientific cartography. I have 

 been interested less in what New Brunswick maps illustrate of the prin- 

 ciples of cartography, than in what they teach about New Brunswick 

 history. Hence there are some points in which m}'^ study is weak, such 

 as discussion of evolving latitude and longitude, difterent kinds of pro- 

 jections employed in the maps, etc. On the one hand, I have not found 



