1138 REPORT—1885. 
A day’s journey west of Chia-ting is the famous Mount O-mei, rising 11,100 feet 
above the level of the sea. This mountain, which is sacred to the worship of 
Buddha, Mr. Hosie ascended in company with crowds of pilgrims. He then 
proceeded south, skirting the eastern boundary of Independent Lolodom, to the 
River of Golden Sand, the left hank of which was struck at the town of Man-i-ssit, 
between forty and fifty miles above P‘ng-shan Hsien—the highest point reached by 
the Upper Yangtsze Expedition in 1861. From Man-i-ssii Mr. Hosie descended 
the Chin-sha Chiang and the Great River to Ch‘ung-ch‘ing. 
2. Notes on the large Southern Tributaries of the Rio Solimoes or Upper 
Amazon in Brazil, with special reference to the Rio Jutahi. By Professor 
J. W. H. Trait. 
3. The Depth and Temperature of some Scottish Lakes. 
By J. Y. BUCHANAN. 
4, On the Geographical Features of the Beauly Basin. 
By Tuo. W. Wattace. 
5. What has been done for the Geography of Scotland, and what remains to 
be done.! By H. A. Wupster. 
After explaining that he wished rather to offer a few practical suggestions for 
the future than to be the mere chronicler of the past, he gave a brief sketch of the 
various contributions made to the map of Scotland previous to the establishment 
of the Ordnance Survey, calling attention more especially to the wonderful pere- 
grinations of Timothy Pont, a reproduction of whose maps and notes in their entirety 
would be worth the attention of some of our publishing societies. He next pro- 
ceeded to point out that, admirable as the labours of the Ordnance Survey admittedly 
were (and, for one thing, they for the first time enabled the geographer to form a 
true idea of the vertical development of the country), they could not be considered 
complete until certain dacune, especially as regards altitudes, were filled up, and 
until the general results were rendered more readily available by being co-ordinated 
in an official handbook. The parochial character of the details registered in the 
area-books of the survey rendered them practically useless to the geographer. 
Even were he content to accept the parish as the unit of description (and a more ~ 
absurd one could hardly he found), it was only by a tedious arithmetical process 
he could discover how much of this area was occupied by land and how much by 
water, how much was arable and how much forest. To all such questions as, 
What is the length of this river? What is the extent of its basin? To what 
distance is it navigable? To what distance does the tide ascend? How much of 
this or that area lies between 500 and 1,000 feet? how much between 1,000 and 
1,500 feet? and so on, the maps of the Survey might be said to contain the answers, 
but in most cases they contained them, so to speak, only in solution. No accwrate 
measurement, for example, appeared to have been made of the river-basin areas ; 
and, according to Mr. Stanford’s estimate, it would cost a private person 202. to get 
the necessary operations performed. Even the accurate measurement of all the 
development lengths of the rivers would be a tedious task. But to several of the 
questions which the geographer naturally asks the Ordnance Survey maps supplied 
no answer in any form. We had the altitude of many of the lakes, but for some 
of the more important ones no precise figures were given. In some cases the area- 
books of the parishes enabled us to find the areas of the lakes; in other cases they 
did not. In regard to the depth of our lakes and rivers—and the submerged portion 
of a valley is geographically as interesting as the sub-aérial portion—absolutely no 
» Printed in extenso in The Seottish Geographical Magazine, October 1885. 
