us THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA 



but his first maps were his father's transportation maps, with only 

 a network of railroads on them, without any coloring. 



Both boys were deeply interested in street-car tracks, making 

 them whenever they had a chance : on the ground, in the sand-pile, 

 with pencil on paper, etc. At the same time A. liked to follow the 

 designs on rugs, the twist of the wires on fences, railroad tracks. 

 And when he became familiar with the conventions of the maps 

 and knew how to find rivers, he would never get tired of tracing 

 a river to its source and down to its rrouth. At the age of five 

 years nine and a half months he received an atlas, which contained, 

 among other things, a map of the routes of famous discoverers. It 

 became A's delight to study these lines, and, as he could not yet 

 read, he wou-d come to me for information as to what these lines 

 meant. His enthusiasm in this direction was so great, that we 

 found it necessary to curb it, or he would spend all his time over 

 it, straining his eyes, missing his meals, not getting enough exer- 

 cise, and imposing the atlas on every one. 



Between the ages of three years seven months and four years 

 nine months he was greatly interested in plans. His parents were 

 then studying plans of houses with the view of buying or building 

 a home, and he liked to look at these plans, and very soon learned 

 to understand them and to make some of his own. At the age of 

 four years and two months he often made attempts to make a 

 crude plan of our neighborhood, without calling it "plan" however. 

 From the age of six he begged for a map of Norman, several times 

 tried to draw one himself, and when he finally obtained a plan of 

 the city of Norman — at the age of seven and a half — he studied it 

 so carefully, that he found some mistakes in the distribution of 

 the houses. 



Perhaps his love for the map is partly due to his taste for 

 exactness ; he wants to know the exact location of places. When 

 he looks up any city on the map, he is not satisfied with the "more 

 or less" indication, he wants to know the exact spot, its position 

 relative to other known places, and very often its exact latitude. 

 He has expressed himself repeatedly as preferring "The Swiss 

 Family Robinson" to DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe : "You see, I can't 

 tell about Robinson Crusoe just where he went — it is always just 

 SW by S or something like it ; but in Swiss Family Robinson there 

 is a map, and everything is plain, every time they move I knov/ 

 exactly where and how" — this at the age of eight and a half. 



The sky map is just as interesting to him as geographical 

 maps. He saw a sky map for the first time at the age of eight 

 years and two months. He knew then already several constella- 



