22 Lif<- and Lrtti'iH (tf Frauds (Halton 



But GjilU)n wanted more than tlie accuracy of the ordnance map, he 

 wanted a pictorial map, a bird's-eye view of a coloured model. 



"It is hHrdly to be expected that travellers should always find it advisable to draw up for 

 publication large pictorial charts <if the routes tliey have ti-avelle<l, but duplicates of their 

 sketches and surveys would l)e a very valuable acquisition to the records of Oeojjraphical Societies, 

 where they could be studied by map-makers, who wished to compile a pictorial chart of the 

 country in which they lay. It would, I should think, l»e a very interesting task to endeavour 

 to map a district on this method, and the result would be sure to l)e a gratifying one, if the 

 traveller had the eye and the touch of an artist '. The strictly accurate, but meagre information 

 that is atTorded to a student by ordinary maps is more tantali.sing than .satisfactory. A blind 

 man fingering a model could learn its much from his sense uf touch alone, as they convey to our 

 eyes. They are little more than an abstraction, or a ghost of the vivid recollections with which 

 the memory of the traveller is stored, not that these recollections are very varied or shifting — 

 one image succee<]s another in rapid changes — but that the somewhat stereotyped survey which 

 the mind recalls when it attempts to image to itself the feature-s of a once-visited country, is 

 a matter of colour and blaze of sunshine, and dancing waters and quaint crags or well-marked 

 headlands, and here and there stretches of level land clothed with nisset forests or lying open 

 in tawny plains. It is surely not too much to expect that at lea.st some allusion to these features 

 — which are everything to the memory, which are precisely what every traveller whom we address 

 is mentally referring to as hig map, whilst he answers our questions — should find a legitimate 

 place even in the highest and driest system of topography*." 



In short Gralton wanted geological and vegetational information added 

 to the maps then in voi^ue, and he thouj,'ht it possible to combine a graphic 

 picture with a sufficiently faithful ground-plan. He had great hopes from 

 the art of colour lithography then being rapidly developed'. Galton's 

 senses were keenly alive when travelling and he remarks in this paper that 

 France, Switzerland, Germany and almost every European country has its 

 pervading smell, and its pervading sounds, all widely alien to the experiences 

 of our own mother-country. It was something of the impressions of all this 

 local colouring which Galton found so painfull}^ missing in maps. 



"be made intelligible and interesting to the general public of educated men" (!). In the first 

 volume, besides papers by Galton's friends Charles Astor Bristed, the American (see Memoriei, 

 p. 77), and Charles Buxton (Ibid. p. 69), there were paj>ers by Liveing, Fitzjames Stephen, and 

 W. Q. Clark (Ibid. p. 70), also a close intimate of UalUni. The Essays thus were the product 

 of Galton's close contemporaries, if they did not actually spring from his entourage. I have 

 failed to find who really set them going. 



' Galton refers in this matter to popular coloure<l bird's-eye views of the Crimea and Baltic, 

 poor in execution, but 8uppl3'ing a distinct want. He notes also Ziegler's geological maps. 



* Loe. cit. p. 97. Eighteen years later a letter to George Darwin shows that Galton's thoughts 

 were still working on the same lines. After referring to projecting mouldings on maps to repre- 

 sent mountain chains, modelling from successive contours, Galton continues: 



"I have often thought of procuring a really artistically made and coloure<l globe [elsewhere 

 he suggests one of 9 feet diameter] and once had much correspondence alx>ut it. Kuskin wrote 

 a very good letter. It seems to me that one might set to work by making a spherical shell, 

 cutting it up into conoenient parts like a puzzle map, and mount the parts that were tem- 

 porarily wanted to be con8ult<Hl on a convex table. These could be multiplied by casts, also by 

 electrotj'pe." (British Association, Bradford, Sept. 24, 1873.) The last s<'ntence shows that 

 Galton intended his globe to be a mo<lel of the world's surface, not a mere nuip. 



• Seventeen years later Galton proposed at a council meeting of the Royal (Geographical 

 Society that the interest on the Murchison Fund l>e expended this year (1 1872) in procuring 

 specimens of, and a report on, the various styles of cartographic representation now in use Ixitli 

 in England and abroad, as regards shading, colours, symliols, and method and cost of production, 

 but not as regards projection, and that a committee should be appointed to arrange particulars. 



