166 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



dilated to instill prejudice than to lay the foundation for 

 mutual understanding. 



5. All of our ideas of the shapes of countries come 

 from maps and models, and likewise nearly all our ideas 

 of their size. While, however, we learn the shapes cor- 

 rectly, we fail woefully in getting a correct idea of the 

 relative or the actual size of foreign countries or of dis- 

 tances between places. This is due directly to having 

 such a variety of scales to our maps that our resultant 

 memory image has shape only, but no scale by which we 

 can calculate or think size adequately. 



To most of us, our Western States are thought of as 

 too small and New England as too large ; we think Great 

 Britain as relatively too large and Russia as too small. 

 Europe is too large and Asia is too small in our mental 

 map to enable us to make true comparisons. For illus- 

 tration, Missouri and Washington are each larger than 

 all of New England, but do they seem to have that size 

 in our thought ? The Yellowstone National Park is about 

 the size of Porto Rico and is larger than Rhode Island 

 and Delaware combined. Java has the same area as 

 England, and Ceylon is half as large. Maine is larger 

 than Ireland. New Zealand is considerably larger than 

 the Island of Great Britain, with England, Scotland, and 

 Wales. Formosa is larger. than either Maryland or Hol- 

 land. Borneo is larger than Texas. India stretches as 

 far as from the mouth of the Chesapeake to Panama. 

 Korea is larger than either Idaho, Minnesota, or Utah. 

 From Peking to Canton, China, it is about as far as from 

 Duluth to New Orleans. 



How many of us think of these countries in their true 

 size? It is a great deal as tho we used a pair of field 

 glasses in looking at part of the earth's surface and 

 then reversed the glasses and looked thru the other 

 end at other countries. It is thru this sense impres- 

 sion from maps of varying scales that our minds are 

 furnished with memory images that are inconsistent 

 with reality. The scale of the maps in our atlases and 

 on our wall charts is determined chiefly by the con- 

 venience of the printer and the cost in making the pages 

 of uniform size and therefore of varying scale. The 



