166 
caught and its stomach opened. Now the sun- 
fish is often seen upon the surface, and is 
harpooned or otherwise captured there; but Prof. 
Grassi will not admit that this is its normal 
habitat, but thinks that it only now and then 
comes up from the greater depths. This is not 
the usual belief, but it was Lo Bianco’s, as Grassi 
tells us, and Lo Bianco’s opinion carries a deal 
of weight. After all, then, the sunfish may be a 
denizen of the deep waters, like Lampris luna. 
But, in the few cases where a sunfish has been 
found to contain other diet than Leptocephali, the 
stomach was found full of Salpz, pteropods, and 
Velella, and they had doubtless been fed upon, 
if not at the surface, at least in the upper layers. 
If we may at all venture an opinion, Dr. Schmidt 
seems to have the better of the argument. A 
minor but curious question is how the sunfish, 
with its tiny mouth and apparently awkward body, 
is able to catch, by hundreds and by thousands, 
these little active, transparent Leptocephali. 
Da Wa 
CARTE INTERNATIONALE DU MONDE AU 
MILLIONIEME. 
HE conference of London, which assembled 
at the Foreign Office in November, 1gog, 
at the invitation of the British Government, drew 
up an elaborate code of rules for the construction 
of an international map on the scale of one in a 
million. In the four years which have passed 
since that meeting about a dozen sheets in all 
have been completed, though not so many have 
been published. It had soon become evident that 
a second conference was required for two reasons. 
Certain of the resolutions of London worked badly 
in practice, and needed modification; while 
several of the Governments which would be called 
upon to undertake a considerable share of the 
work had not been represented in London, and 
desired to be heard before committing themselves 
to the scheme. 
The second international conference met in 
Paris, at the invitation of the French Government, 
in December last, and_ thirty-three countries 
were represented by delegates officially nomin- 
ated, whose resolutions will be submitted to their 
respective Governments for formal ratification. 
This official character of the meeting has much 
practical importance. The scheme had been dis- 
cussed at successive meetings of the International 
Geographical Congress for twenty years; it re- 
mained inoperative until the first official confer- 
ence of 1900. 
The first business of the Paris meeting was 
to decide what parts of the London resolutions 
should stand unchanged, and what was open to 
discussion. A prompt decision to leave as much 
as possible untouched cleared the way for the 
real business of the meeting, which resolved itself 
into three parts—the revision of the conventional 
signs; the improvement of the colour scale for 
the layers, and other details of the representa- 
tion of relief; and the distribution of the sheets 
NO. -2320,) VOU, -93] 
NAT ORE 
[APRIL 16, 1914 
which covered the territory of several Powers. 
The three commissions which were nominated to 
deal with these questions chose as their presidents 
Prof. Penck, Colonel Thiébaut, of the Service 
géographique de l’armée, and Colonel Close, 
respectively. General Bourgeois, chief of the 
Service géographique, presided over the full con- 
ference with admirable firmness and lucidity. 
The work of the first commission involved long 
meetings and animated discussion on the classi- 
fication of towns and the spelling of place names,, 
which affect different countries in very different 
ways. A system of town classification which is. 
good for Europe is hopeless for Africa, while the 
relative claims of population and administrative 
importance lead to difficulties on a single sheet. 
The spelling of place names in Eastern Europe 
is fiercely contestable; the transliteration of 
African names into European equivalents produces 
endless trouble on boundary sheets. On these 
matters no hard and fast agreement was possible ; 
much must be left to the discretion of the estab- 
lishment that makes the sheet. Minor difficulties. 
in the classification of railways, navigable rivers, 
and roads were amicably adjusted, and the result- 
ing conventional signs sheet is in many respects. 
a great improvement on that adopted four years 
ago. 
The work of the second commission was very 
much simplified by the production of experimental 
variants of the Istambul sheet, which had been 
prepared by Colonel Hedley in the Geographical 
Section of the General Staff. Fine black contours, 
instead of brown, were accepted without difh- 
culty. The ugly and unsatisfactory upper tones 
of the London colour scale for layer tints found 
few defenders, and it was not difficult to sub- 
stitute a scale running into orange and red in 
place of the old brown and magenta. Above the 
snow line the layer tint is to be omitted; glaciers 
are to be distinguished by blue form lines or 
hachures, and there is liberty to use shading when 
the contours are not sufficient to bring up the 
form of the snow peaks. In principle the contour 
interval is, as before, 100 metres throughout; 
but this is not always feasible, while the sup- 
pression of contours at discretion leads to un- 
necessary diversity. The remedy was to declare 
certain contours obligatory (courbes maitresses), 
the others being discretionary. 
The third commission laid down the principle 
that the right to produce a sheet belonged to the 
country which owned most territory within its 
limits, and refused to make any pronouncement 
as to sheets lying wholly in territories which have 
no cartographical establishments. The signifi- 
cance of the latter decision was lessened by the 
announcement of the Chinese delegate that topo- 
graphical establishments were now in active 
operation in all the provinces of the Republic. 
The delegates of the South American States came 
to an important agreement among themselves in 
regard to the representation of doubtful 
boundaries. 
In the full sessions the decisions of the com: 
