THE CONQUEST OF TIME AND SPACE 



explored. The thing seems simple enough now, thanks 

 to the maps with which every one has been famihar 

 since childhood. But it required no small exercise of 

 ingenuity to devise a reasonably satisfactory method of 

 representing on a jflat surface regions that in reality 

 are distributed over the surface of a globe. The method 

 devised by Mercator, and which, as everyone knows, is 

 now universally adopted, consists in drawing the merid- 

 ians as parallel lines, giving therefore a most distorted 

 presentation of the globe, in which the distance be- 

 tween the meridians at the poles — where in reality 

 there is no distance at all — is precisely as great as at 

 the equator. To make amends for this distortion, the 

 parallels of latitude are not drawn equidistant, as in 

 reality they practically are on the globe, but are spaced 

 farther and farther apart, as we advance from the 

 equator toward either pole. The net result is that an 

 island in the arctic region would be represented on the 

 map several times as large as an island actually the 

 same size but located near the equator. Doubtless 

 most of us habitually conceive Alaska and Greenland to 

 be vastly more extensive regions than they really are, 

 because of our famiharity with maps showing this so- 

 called "Mercator's projection." 



Of course maps are also made that hold to the true 

 proportions, representing the lines of latitude as equi- 

 distant and the meridians of longitude as lines con- 

 verging to a point at the poles. But while such a map 

 as this has certain advantages — giving, for example, a 

 correct notion of the relative sizes of polar and other 

 land masses — it is otherwise confusing inasmuch as 



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