THE IXTERXATIOXAL ^IILLIONTH MAP 



129 



names of various features were agreed 

 to in detail after thorough discussion by 

 a large subcommittee. The result em- 

 bodies practically all the conventions 

 used by the United States Geological 

 Survey, in the form in which they are 

 employed in the government maps. 



"FLORiiNCE." "rome;," "vienna" will 



DISAPPEAR FROM THE MAP 



In writing and spelling names the Latin 

 alphabet alone may be used and the spell- 

 ing shall be that of the official maps of 

 the country represented. Thus the inter- 

 national map will show nothing of Rus- 

 sian or Chinese script. You will look in 

 vain for Florence, but will find Firenze ; 

 instead of Rome, Roma ; of Flushing, 

 Missingen ; of A'ienna, Wien, and so 

 forth. There was no dissent from this 

 last ruling except in one instance. In 

 odd contradiction to the general liberality 

 of feeling, it was emphatically declared 

 that European geographers could not per- 

 mit Stamboul, the Turkish name, to 

 replace Constantinople. For China the 

 adopted spelling was to be that of the 

 post and customs service, and in all colo- 

 nies or protectorates the names are to be 

 spelled in accordance with the usage of 

 the governing country. The delegate 

 from Hungary presented the grave diffi- 

 culty which confronts the cartographer 

 in the fact that nearly all Hungarian 

 towns have two names, one Hungarian 

 and the other German, and some of them 

 have as manv as five nam€s, all of which 

 are currently used by the distinct ele- 

 ments of the population. But it was 

 pointed out that this difficulty affects but 

 one or two sheets of the great atlas of 

 the world, and that the question of choos- 

 ing among these names might well be left 

 to the Hungarian government. 



HOW ELEVATIONS V/ILL BE INDICATED 



There is perhaps nothing which more 

 strikingly distinguishes new maps from 

 old ones, or maps of one nationality from 

 those of another, than the manner in 

 which valleys, hills, and mountains are 

 represented, whether it be bv drawing 

 the shapes of mountains, as in Chinese 



maps, or by covering the paper with short 

 dashes, sometimes called hachures, which 

 show the way the water runs, or by hori- 

 zontal lines that delineate the contours of 

 the slopes, or by shading with high light 

 and shadow, as if the map were a relief 

 model. Hachures, contours, and relief 

 shading, or combinations of two or even 

 of all three methods, characterize modern 

 topographic maps, and one of the most 

 difficult questions before the conference 

 was to harmonize the various methods in 

 current use. 



In maps prepared by the United States 

 Geological Survey contour lines alone are 

 used, and the delineation of mountain 

 forms by means of them has been 

 brought to a higher degree of graphic 

 expression than ever before. This is due 

 to the fact that the American topographer 

 regards his work as a profession rather 

 than as a side issue of military training, 

 which is the position which holds 

 abroad. 



In Germany and Austria the method of 

 exhibiting slopes by means of hachures 

 has replaced all other systems, because 

 it is so applied that the proportion of 

 dark lines to intervening light spaces 

 bears a mathematical relation to the 

 steepness of the slope. Level plains are 

 white, and slopes of 45 degrees are al- 

 most black, and other slopes are shaded 

 according to their grade. These maps 

 are peculiarly adapted to military pur- 

 poses, since an officer can judge at a 

 glance the nature of a declivity and 

 whether it is passable by infantry, cav- 

 alry, or perhaps artillery ; but these ad- 

 vantages do not everywhere have weight, 

 and the method is one which is too ex- 

 pensive in execution and too limited in 

 usefulness to be widely adopted. France 

 has brought relief shading to a very high 

 degree of perfection, and leads the world 

 in the artistic beauty of her topograpliic 

 maps. 



The method of representing the topo- 

 graphic relief of the surface which the 

 conference adopted consists in the main 

 of generalized contours, which shall bc^ 

 so drawn as not to unduly obscure otlier 

 features of the map, and, in addition. 



