290 
NOTE AND COMMENT. 
The Field of the Mazamas. 
"MAZAMAS: You have chosen a fieldin which your labors, your example 
and your influence are bound to benefit your fellow men. Your officers in their brief 
addresses have said many wise things. They have urged you to let your outings bear 
fruit — to contribute to the sum of human knowledge — and you have responded with 
an earnestness of purpose that is a credit to yourselves and to your State. As moun- 
tain climbers and explorers you have increased our knowledge of the geography and 
topography of the Northwest and stimulated the collection of accurate information 
respecting its natural history and resources. The first number of your publication , 
" Mazama," contains a fund of useful information, and, if I am correctly informed, 
the second will be even more valuable. These publications, of which you may well 
be proud, will carry the name and fame of the Mazamas to many lands and will give 
you rank among the useful scientific societies of the world. 
In your summer excursions, go where you will, you cannot fail to be im- 
pressed by the need for better maps. You should keep this need perpetually before 
the eyes of your friends and legislators, and should exert your influence individually 
and collectively to secure more accurate topographic surveys and more reliable 
maps. Good contour maps form a basis for the intelligent development of a country. 
They are useful to every citizen who can read and write; they are of service to the 
ranchman and miner in locating their claims; they are money in the pocket of the 
railroad corporation seeking to lay out new lines, and of the shrewd merchant who 
understands the principles of commercial geography; they are indispensable to the 
scientist, the statistician and the political economist who desire to plat the results of 
their investigations. Without them it is impossible to show graphically the distri- 
bution of animals and plants, the position of coal fields ani other mineral deposits, 
the relation of climatic conditions and soils to successful agriculture, the distribution 
of forests, deserts, and irrigable lands, the distribution of religions, nationalities, pop- 
ulations, and wealth, and the distribution of industries and productions with 
reference to the underlying conditions which determine the commercial success or 
failure of human enterprise. Who has not seen capital wasted and energy expended 
without return, for lack of knowledge of fundamental truths that may be learned 
from the intelligent study of accurate statistical and commercial maps? In short, 
good maps are worth ten times what they cost. They are needed by ever}' one from 
the school child to the oldest citizen; our educational system is incomplete without 
them, and it should be considered discreditable to any commonwealth to neglect 
their construction. By cooperating with the general Government and paying half 
the cost of the field work, any state or territory may secure for itself the best possible 
large scale contour maps of its domain. A number of states have already availed 
themselves of this privilege. Cannot the Ma^ramas exert their united influence in 
having Oregon mapped iinder the same law? 
But your field is not limited to ' geography ' — at least in the old sense. The 
'National Geographic Society,' of which some of you are valued members, has five 
departments: Geography of the Land, Geography of the Sea, Geography of the Air, 
Geography of Life, and Commercial Geography. These several departments embrace 
pretty much all the natural sciences — including geology, zoology, botany, meterorol- 
ogy and so on. Should the scope of the Mazamas be any less comprehensive? Few 
