96 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
But I think it is fair to enquire if the original scheme was sound, The 
history of international scientific enterprises is not uniformly encouraging. 
The International Chart of the Heavens was projected in 1887, and begun 
about 1891, under rigid rules to secure uniformity. It was even proposed 
that all the plates should be developed by a uniform formula. About 
twenty years later it was found necessary to publish a guide to the 
published catalogues, because no two observatories had used the same 
system, and it was impossible without a guide to find the way about in 
them. This was an extreme example. But there is an old proverb that 
if you want a thing well done you must do it yourself, and with suitable 
modification this seems to me to apply especially to mapmaking. It is 
difficult enough for a single office to produce at intervals sheets that will 
absolutely match their neighbours. To expect uniformity from twenty 
or thirty reproduction offices is to expect altogether too much. One 
might indeed overlook slight differences in layer tints if one could only 
get the maps; but that is just the difficulty. Some countries are keen 
to meet their obligations, and some are not. India has produced a fine 
block of sheets ; the North American Continent—I will not particularise— 
has produced three. And J think we should find if we took a census that 
the majority of the Powers represented at Paris in 1913 have produced 
none, and show few signs of doing so. 
With some trepidation I suggest, therefore, that the scheme for an 
International Map was bound to fail, because it required that each of 
many different countries should do its share, after a preliminary wrangle 
with its neighbours as to what that share was. Successful international 
co-operations have never worked that way. What has been the guiding 
principle of the successful enterprises? Surely that the reputed cost 
should be contributed by the nations in rough proportion to their 
populations, and that the work should be done by one. The Bureau 
International des Poids et Mesures, the old International Geodetic 
Association’s Institute, the modern Bureau International de l’Heure, all 
these work or worked on that plan, with great success. The contributing 
nations get a great deal for a very small payment, and the nation which 
has the energy to take on the responsibility, and gets the credit, naturally 
contributes from its own resources, directly or indirectly, a large and 
essential part of the total cost. 
The International Map is a bigger thing altogether, but I believe that 
the same principle applies to it, that it will never become really successful 
until some one establishment undertakes the whole production, on com- 
pilations supplied if you like by each country, and perhaps on some scale 
of payment for each sheet produced. Such organisation would solve a 
real present difficulty, that when the maps are produced it is difficult to 
buy them. No dealer in London, for example, finds that it pays to stock — 
the scattered sheets that are produced in ones or twos in different capitals ; 
and I do not suppose that in any country it is easier. 
Moreover, the world was not ripe for a general map on the scale of 
1/1,000,000 : a smaller scale will do at present for Africa and Asia; and — 
it is far more important to get a general map out quick, though the scale 
be smaller, than to aim at a uniform scale disproportionate to the available — 
detail, The Survey of India has set us an admirable example in its map © 
of India and Adjacent Countries, with a liberal interpretation of what : 
