168 MAPS AND THEIR MAKERS 



Alexander Keith Johnston. This native of Edinburgh, who 

 had commenced cartography as early as 1830, had, in travel on 

 the Continent, become acquainted with Humboldt and Ritter, 

 receiving encouragement from the former to produce an 

 English equivalent of Berghaus' 'Physikalischer Atlas'. An 

 arrangement was made for the use of Berghaus' material, but 

 this ultimately fell through, and Johnston went to work 

 independently. The statement sometimes made that his 

 Thysical Atlas' was merely an English edition of the German 

 is incorrect. The Atlas (second edition, 1856) was favourably 

 received, in all some 2,500 copies being sold, and was declared 

 by Ritter to be of higher merit than its German rival. His 

 'Royal Atlas' of 1859, the German sheets of which were minutely 

 criticized in proof by Prince Albert, was another conscientious 

 piece of work. 



The mutual relations between German and British carto- 

 graphers is further illustrated by the career of August Peter- 

 mann, who first went to Edinburgh as assistant to Johnston, 

 and later set up as a lithographic printer and map publisher in 

 London in 1847. Here in touch with the Royal Geographical 

 Society he met many of the travellers who were opening up the 

 interiors of the continents. Finally he was induced to join the 

 Perthes firm in Gotha, where his contacts were invaluable in 

 obtaining and publishing the results of contemporary ex- 

 ploration. 



Contemporary with Keith Johnston and Petermann were 

 the two John Bartholomews, father and son, who founded 

 the Edinburgh Cartographical Institute. They did much to 

 improve the standard of non-official cartography in Britain, 

 and introduced new techniques; John George Bartholomew, 

 the third of the line, for example, initiated the layer-colouring 

 of medium-scale maps. Also noteworthy is J. G. Bartholomew's 

 project of a great Thysical Atlas' in five volumes, which was to 

 sum up the state of knowledge at the end of the nineteenth 

 century. In 1899 appeared the 'Atlas of Meteorology' designed 

 to be Vol. 3 of the series, and edited by Alexander Buchan. It 

 contained over 400 maps dealing with all the elements of 

 climate and types of weather. This was followed in 1911 by 

 Vol. 5, 'The Atlas of Zoogeography'. No further volumes were 



