E.—GEOGRAPHY. 97 
adjacent means. We followed their example in a humble way at the R.G.S. 
when, during the War, we compiled a good part of Africa on 1/2,000,000, 
and began a 1/4,000,000 of Asia. When we were demobilised these 
projects were taken over by the G.S.G.S., and have made great progress. 
The map of Asia, in particular, does the greatest credit to the office which 
is plugging away at it. Is it beyond hope, that even in these hard times 
that section of the General Staff might be given means to produce a map 
of the ‘ British Empire and Adjacent Countries ’"—again without too much 
regard to the niceties of language ? 
Such a map of the world is indeed an almost necessary outcome of 
the P.C.G.N.’s work on names for British official use, for if unity of style 
_ could be achieved by miracle in an international map, there is no hope 
_ whatever for unity of spelling, or even of nomenclature. A sheet bears 
inevitably in its methods of transliteration the mark of its origin. We 
are all agreed that names in countries using the Roman alphabet should 
be spelled as in that country ; the difficulty comes in transliteration from 
the non-Roman, and in descriptive names. The International Hydro- 
graphic Bureau at Monaco seems to me to have entered on a hopeless 
quest when it tries to obtain international agreement for the names of 
international waters. The French must surely always call Pas de Calais 
and La Manche what we call the Straits of Dover and the English Channel. 
The Germans will doubtless continue to speak of the Ost See, even though 
the bishop’s wife protested to Elizabeth in Riigen that ‘ the Baltic exactly 
describes it.’ Much can be done, no doubt, to eliminate superfluous 
_ variants and modern corruptions; but I do believe that the names for 
* British Official Use ’ must always have a certain British flavour, however 
much we try to be scrupulous or even pedantic. 
You will agree with me, I trust, that the science of mapmaking is 
healthily active and growing. Let us turn now to the art, which is two- 
fold: the art of the convention by which the outline and the relief are 
reduced to the compilation, and the. personal art of drawing the detail, 
_ the lettering, the divided margins, the ornaments, so that the finished map 
_ shall be clear, harmonious, and beautiful. 
During the last thirty years we have seen the convention profoundly 
modified by the rapid improvement of colour lithography. Colour has, 
it is true, been used on engraved maps from the very first, and in my 
opinion the most agreeably coloured atlas ever published was the Rome 
= of Ptolemy of 1486. But this was hand colouring, and no two 
§ 
= 
| 
. 
| 
copies are alike. In the years that followed the colour became more 
elaborate, but it was largely in the ornament, and the essential outline of 
_ the map was in black, from the single engraved plate. The great extension 
of possibilities came with the quite modern use of colour to distinguish 
_ the outlines of different classes: blue for rivers, brown for contours, red 
for roads, and so on. And the enormous resulting improvement was 
_ conspicuously in the representation of relief. Layer colouring in par- 
_ ticular, first employed on a large scale by the celebrated firm of Bar- 
_ tholomew, has given our maps all the advantages of a relief model without 
_ the inconveniences. It is a method in which the British have always 
excelled ; and the supreme example of skill in layer colour-printing is 
the ‘Gamme’ or colour scale attached to the report of the Paris Con- 
_ ference of the 1/Million Map in 1913: a scale which we may be proud to 
1925 H 
