E.— GEOGRAPHY. 95 
extended. Moreover, this way of dealing with the subject allows the 
conscientious cartographer to distribute the errors judiciously by a process 
of cooking the projection, producing a flavour much appreciated by the 
connoisseur, though a taste not yet acquired by the common mapmaker. 
But these refinements must not be looked at askance, as over-elaboration 
tending to preciosity. They have real practical advantages in the com- 
puting office, and strange though it may seem, the most interesting 
theoretically were inspired by the practical needs of the Allied Armies in 
the field. They have changed the whole aspect of the subject; and I 
_ speak feelingly as the guilty author of a text-book only thirteen years old, 
on a subject more than two thousand, which must at the first opportunity 
be entirely re-written. 
| This branch of our venerable science is therefore very much alive. 
Tt has even produced of late two new families—the retro-azimuthal 
projections which are the offspring of the-Survey of Egypt, and the doubly- 
zenithal whose father is Sir Charles Close. The former guides the Muslim 
in his prostration towards Mecca; the latter serves wireless direction- 
finding and other devices of the twentieth century. Could a student 
_ desire a subject of wider scope in which to exercise his powers ? 
The thought of the very charming modification of the Polyconic 
: projection devised by M. Charles Lallemand for the International Map on 
_ the scale of one in a million, leads us naturally to consider the outcome of 
that ambitious programme which was launched at the London Conference 
of 1909. The second conference of 1913, at Paris, established a Central 
: Bureau for the map in the offices of the Ordnance Survey, and we have 
already had the advantage in this section of hearing from its Secretary a 
valuable statement of the situation. I sometimes wonder ii Major MacLeod, 
in that august position, looks back with a fond regret or with a righteous 
indignation upon the quite irregular enterprise in which he and I were 
partners during the early days of the War. In the beginning of August 
1914 two officers of the Survey of India, on sick leave in London, and 
officially forbidden to work, spent their enforced leisure at the house of 
the Royal Geographical Society preparing a skeleton map of the Western 
Front on the scale of 1/500,000. A proposal to reduce it to 1/1,000,000 led, 
quite naturally, to a little scheme for rapidly compiling a few sheets of 
the International Map covering Central Europe, of which Colonel Hedley 
admitted that six might be useful. By the end of the War our volunteer 
‘staff had compiled nearly one hundred sheets, and the War Office and 
Ordnance Survey had published them. We learned our job from Major 
‘MacLeod in those hectic months before he was passed fit and went away 
‘to win distinction in France and on the Rhine. The map to which he 
contributed about five sheets to every one that his colleagues could make 
‘was a rapid improvisation, keeping as near as might be to the scheme of 
the International Map. It was rough compilation, and not too accurate, 
but it spread across Europe and the Near East in a slow continuous 
expansion, and I do not think that more than half a dozen of the sheets 
have as yet been superseded by the legitimate offspring of the Convention. 
For this there are the best, or worst, of reasons. Difficult as it was to 
secure enthusiastic co-operation before 1914 in producing sheets whose 
_ marginal lines were necessarily drawn on a hard geometrical convention 
_ regardless of frontiers, it is trebly difficult now. 
