CHAPTER X 



THE BRITISH CONTRIBUTION IN THE 

 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



A DETAILED Study of the British contribution to cartography 

 before the eighteenth century hes outside the scope of this 

 outline. Accounts of the achievements of men such as George 

 Lily, Christopher Saxton, Norden, Speed, Ogilvy and John 

 Adams, to mention a few names only, can be found in the 

 works of Sir George Fordham, Dr. Edward Lynam, and Prof. 

 E. G. R. Taylor. In the second place, the emphasis here must 

 be on the general development of maps and mapping, and it 

 cannot be claimed that, however important in British carto- 

 graphy these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cartographers 

 are, they were in the van of technical progress. In the main they 

 followed, often with a considerable time lag, the practice of 

 their contemporaries in Portugal, Italy, the Low Countries 

 and France. Saxton is surmised to have used methods of 

 survey developed by Gemma Phrysius, and much of the 

 attractiveness of his county maps is due to his Flemish en- 

 gravers. The maps of Sanson and Delisle were industriously 

 copied by English map publishers like William Berry, and the 

 surveyors who in the eighteenth century won with their 

 county maps the prizes offered by the Royal Society of Arts 

 were not superior to the men who were producing the Cassini 

 map in France. 



There were of course exceptions to this generalization. 

 The magnificent Molyneux globe of 1592, the first made in 

 England and by an Englishman, was not excelled by any 

 contemporary production. An important contribution to map 

 projections was made by Edward Wright when he worked out 

 mathematically the formula for Mercator's projection. The 

 exiled Sir Robert Dudley was the first to employ this projection 

 generally for the charts in his lavishly produced 'Arcano del 

 Mare' (Florence, 1646). Nor must we overlook the stimulus 



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