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TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 1139 
data were supplied by the Ordance Survey. Nor, with a few individual exceptions, 
did they exist in an accurate and trustworthy form anywhere else. It was an open 
secret that, when this omission was pointed out to the Government by the Royal 
Societies of London and Edinburgh, the Lords of the Treasury refused, and again 
refused, to authorise a bathymetric lake and river survey being carried out, either 
by the officers of the Ordnance Survey or by those of the Hydrographic department. 
Such a refusal could not be permanently accepted. It was to be hoped that when 
the Government was next urged to move in the matter they would be asked for 
more, and not for less. We required not only a hydrographic survey done once 
and for all (though that was worth the doing) ; we required a systematic registra- 
tion of hydrographic facts throughout the country, in order that the true régime 
both of lakes and rivers might be known in detail and with scientific precision. The 
ignorant niggardliness of the British Government was in striking contrast to the 
conduct of those of some foreign countries. In Switzerland, for instance, there 
was a regular system of inland hydrographic observations, by which the régime of 
all the principal rivers was annually recorded and rendered easily intelligible by 
a series of graphic bulletins. In regard to a Swiss river, we could tell the volume 
at any period of the year at several important points, and could compare the facts 
of 1884, for instance, with those of any year in the last two decades. Everyone 
knew what a vast body of interesting data had for generations been accumulating 
about such rivers as the Po and the Rhone, and many~had no doubt heard of the 
system of hydrographic stations recently established by the Italian Government in 
the basin of the Tiber. Why should we not endeavour to learn something definite 
and precise about the character of our own rivers? The investigation was only the 
natural complement on the one hand of the physical structure of the country, and 
on the other hand of its meteorology. Our Scottish Meteorological Society had 
now succeeded in establishing meteorological stations throughout the country ; let 
hydrographic stations bear them company along our principal rivers. Rainfall and 
river discharge were mutually illustrative. Another matter, not so directly of 
geographic import, might be mentioned in passing—the investigation of the different 
chemical qualities of the waters of the different lakes and rivers. But, to proceed 
to a strictly geographical matter, it had been frequently pointed out that unfor- 
tunately the results of the coast surveys had not been incorporated in the seaward 
portions of the Ordnance Survey maps; nor, indeed, was the submarine portion of 
our island group sufficiently attended to in any of our physical maps. <A special 
interest attached to the hollow of the North Sea, but a good deal remained to be 
done before the demands of modern research would be satisfied. Good work was 
happily beginning to be carried on at Granton and elsewhere in regard to the 
ditterence of salinity, &c., between the water of this almost land-locked basin and 
that of the open Atlantic. 
Turning from the physical to the political or administrative geography of Scot- 
land, the reader briefly called attention to the fact that while we had elaborate 
studies of the Ptolemaic geography of the country, and attempts such as those of 
Cosmo Innes, to reconstruct the civil and ecclesiastical divisions of certain 
periods, the detailed history of the rise of the Scottish counties, and of the fixing 
of the Scottish-English border would furnish subjects for difficult but interesting 
investigation. He then referred at some length to the desirableness and possibility 
of collecting and elucidating the whole corpus of Scottish place-names. Important 
studies in this department had been already made by Dr. Skene, Captain Thomas, 
and others; but what was now wanted was a complete system of registration, and 
a co-operative system of historical and philological illustration. Of such a treat- 
ment of national place-names the Netherlands afforded a most instructive example. 
The Publications Committee of the Scottish Geographical Society was endeavouring: 
to organise a special committee in connection with the subject. In conclusion, 
though it might be said that the subject was rather sociological than geographical, 
attention was called to the necessity of a greater application of cartography to the 
rendering of statistical facts, such as those of density of population, birth and 
death rates, distribution of trade and commerce, education, &c. Augustus Peter- 
mann, at the census of i851, set an admirable example to our census authorities, 
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