THE SCIENCE AND ART OF 
MAP-MAKING. 
ADDRESS BY 
A. R. HINKS, C.B.E., F.B.S., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
As Geographers we count ourselves happy that we are met this year in 
the beautiful town of Southampton—an ancient borough well fitted by its 
pride of place in the maritime history of England, by its splendid 
geographical setting, its scientific renown as the seat of the Ordnance 
Survey, its remarkable modern development of natural advantages, and 
_ its traditional hospitality, to receive us with that blend of serious intention 
and discreet gaiety which the cities of England know so well how to offer 
to the British Association. As your President in this Section I count 
_ myself especially fortunate: for it is no small advantage to me that I find 
myself addressing you in a place where it is natural to speak in the language 
of the cartographer, surveyor, and geodesist. Our science of geography 
uses several strange tongues and jargons that have something the appear- 
ance of English: but I have little practice in them. I have never, with 
our great poet-geographer, 
wandered in my dreams 
On banks of consequential streams 
Until my weary head was fain 
To rest upon a peneplain. 
SECTION E—GEOGRAPHY. 
I know next to nothing of those mysterious adjectival objects, 
‘Woollens,’ that figure so largely in the geographical education of the 
modern young. Still less am I able to compete with our senior General 
Secretary or with the late Director-General of the Ordnance Survey in 
arguing that ever-attractive question: What is included in the scope of 
Geography ? I am ready to agree with the former that ‘Geography 
. essays to discover what happens where, and to explain why any- 
thing which happens, happens just when it does; and under what 
combination of circumstances it does happen, just then’; or with the latter 
that there is no accepted definition of Geography, but it is a popularisation 
of geodesy, surveying, cartography, geology, climatology, and ethnology. 
At the risk of getting into as much trouble with the Secretary of the 
Royal Geographical Society as he did over it, I will go nearly so far with 
him, provided that I am not called upon to discuss the grounds of my 
beliefs. Rather than do that, in this town where the language of 
‘cartography must be in every mouth, would I ask leave to discuss the 
Science and Art of Map-making—the Science which has made so notable 
‘an advance, and the Art which has suffered in some respects so lamentable 
a decline since the heroic days of Saxton and Hondius and Norden, of 
Mercator and Blaeu. 
