THE INTERNATIONAL MILLIONTH MAP 

 OF THE WORLD 



By Bailey Willis, U. S. Geological Survey 



FOR whatever the stature of his 

 gnest, however tall or short, that 

 bed fits him to a hair. Because, if 

 a man be too tall for it he lops his limbs 

 till they be short enough, and if he be too 

 short he stretches his limbs till they be 

 long enough. Therefore is he called 

 Procrustes the Stretcher." 



Turn the leaves of any atlas and view 

 the countries, large or small. How they 

 are all fitted to the Procrustan page, 

 some drawn to one scale and some to an- 

 other, but all finally compressed to the 

 same size in the atlas, although widely 

 different in fact. Here is Colorado with 

 103,925, or Wisconsin with 56,040, or 

 Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode 

 Island, all three together with but 14,555 

 square miles ; but the last, like the first, 

 precisely fills the page. If, in Massachu- 

 setts, there be two towns 12 miles apart, 

 there is an inch between them on the map, 

 but if in Colorado there are two 29 miles 

 apart, they also appear upon the map 

 within an inch of one another, the scale 

 in the one case being 12 miles to the inch 

 and in the other 29 miles to the inch. 



This adjustment of the maps in an 

 atlas to different scales to suit the size of 

 the page appears necessary, because each 

 page should be fully covered and the 

 states or countries which need to be sepa- 

 rately mapped are very unequal in size. 

 In local thought the county is larger than 

 the state and the state larger than the 

 whole country, and atlases are made for 

 local use. 



But if we would take a broader view 

 of the world and of nations, wishing to 

 know something of the comparative size 

 of countries — that France, for instance, is 

 about four-fifths as large as Texas — it 

 would be at least a great convenience to 

 have an atlas of the world in which all 

 lands were mapped to the same scale. 



Such an atlas the International Millionth 

 Alap of the World is to be. 



The name signifies that the map is to 

 be drawn on a scale of one to one million ; 

 that is, that any length measured upon 

 the map is to be one-millionth part of the 

 distance between the same two points 

 measured on the ground. In the metric 

 system this is equivalent to saying that a 

 meter on the map is equal to a million 

 meters or 100 kilometers on the ground. 

 In our English measure it is equivalent to 

 about sixteen miles to the inch. This is 

 a fairly large scale, which allows the en- 

 graver to delineate villages as well as 

 cities, railroads and the principal roads, 

 all water-courses of note, and the general 

 features of hills and mountains. Yet the 

 scale is also such that a sheet of con- 

 venient size may represent a large area, 

 on an average equivalent to a State of 

 the United States, and thus the scope of 

 the map is sufficiently generous to be 

 useful. 



Both in scale and scope we may con- 

 trast this one-millionth map with others 

 which are made available to the public by 

 the government surveys. The detailed 

 topographic maps of the United States, 

 which are prepared by the United States 

 Geological Survey from original surveys, 

 are published on a scale of one mile to an 

 inch for the more densely settled regions 

 of the country and of two miles to an 

 inch for the less developed regions. This 

 scale is so large that it is possible to show 

 individual houses, every turn of the 

 roads, and the precise form and altitude 

 of all noticeable hills. With these maps, 

 in advance of other surveys, an engineer 

 may plan the route of a road or even a 

 railroad through a hilly or mountainous 

 country. Thus they are adapted to all 

 detailed studies of local features, but their 

 scale is so large that their scope is very 



