156 GEOGRAPHIC LITERATURE 



Franco-Prussian war broke out, and England, having declared her neu- 

 trality, refused to allow French ships to coal at Aden. The French gov- 

 ernment then oflicially took possession of Sheik Said by making it a 

 coaling station and a refuge for French warships. After the treaty of 

 Frankfort Sheik Said was abandoned. Eaband & Bazin continued to 

 occupy it for some time, but finally withdrew, after lodging a declaration 

 as to their rights and ownership with the Turkish authorities. In 1884 

 the French press again took up the subject, and the government sent out 

 some surveyors and engineers, who found the place occupied by a Turkish 

 garrison. In 1885 the Turkish government officially announced its occupa- 

 tion by a notice published in a newspaper of Sana, the capital of the Yemen- 

 It is very evident that the occupation— I mean a thorough militarj^ occu- 

 pation — of Sheik Said would be of the highest importance to France in 

 view of the enormous development of her colonial empire, and especially 

 of England's continued occupation of Egypt. The way to the Indian 

 ocean and the far East has become almost as important to France as it is 

 to England, and it is hardly fair that one nation should possess all the 

 keys to the gates of the famous waterway to the exclusion of all other 

 nations. France's i^resent occupation of the territory of Obok, on the 

 west side of the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, with the port of Djibouti, is 

 very good as a commercial position, but as a strategic point it can only 

 acquire importance by the addition of Sheik Said on the east side. 



This incident of Sheik Said furnishes an example of inaccurate map- 

 making by men who are appai'ently more zealous and patriotic than 

 learned and accurate. Whatever may be said of the claims of France to 

 the territory in question, it does not appear that England has ever had 

 the shadow of a claim to it, and Mr Philip ought to know that the use of 

 a brush and some color to make a territory appear to be either English, 

 French, or Turkish, according to one's patriotic ambitions, does not make 

 it so. Geographers ought certainly to stick to official facts and not mislead 

 by marking on their maps unofficial and inaccurate boundaries.* 



Ernest de Sassevif.le. 

 Paris, April IS, 1897. 



GEOGRAPHIC LITERATURE 



Bulletin of the Department of Labor. No. 9. Edited by Carroll D. Wriglit, 

 Commissioner ; Oren W. Weaver, Chief Clerk. Pp. 109-236. 



Rand, McNally & Co.'s Road Maps and Cycling Guide to Westchester County, 

 New York. Chicago and New York : Rand, McNally & Co. 50 cents. 



Magnetic Declination in the United States. By Henry Gannett. From the 

 Seventeenth Annual Report of the TJ. S. Geological Survey. Wash- 

 ington, 1896. Pp. 203-440, with map and diagrams. 



Statistical Abstract of the United States. 1896. Nineteenth number. Pre- 

 pared by the Bureau of Statistics, under the direction of the Secretarj' 

 of the Treasury. Pp. xii + 400. Washington, 1897. 



♦ In the Times Atlas, London, 1896, Sheik Said is distinctly marked as a French 

 nossession. J- H. 



