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Representing 
by Richard Edes Harrison 
The Mapmakers, by John Noble Wil- 
ford. Alfred A. Knopf $20.00; 414 pp., 
illus. 
The Mapmakers is a comprehensive 
account of man’s attempts to measure 
and depict our surroundings through- 
out the ages. The author has tackled 
this very complex subject successfully, 
but it should be said at the outset that 
the book concerns itself more with mea- 
surement (surveying) than with depic- 
tion (mapping). And it is not until one 
is halfway through this 200, 000-word 
book that a clear distinction is made be- 
tween the two. As a practicing cartog- 
rapher for fifty years, I do not object, 
however, because in this case surveying 
is certainly the horse that is dragging 
the cart. The title, however, is mislead- 
ing, and my guess is that the publisher 
figured it would be easier to sell a book 
about maps than one about surveying. 
He may be right, but to many readers, 
any work in the field — on land, on the 
seas, in the sky, or in interstellar 
space — is far more interesting than 
work on a drafting table, especially now 
that the drafting table is threatened 
with displacement by computers. So let 
us say that this is a book about survey- 
ing because surveying is still going 
strong. 
Land measurement today involves 
the use of a bewildering array of instru- 
ments, but primitive humans had only 
their eyes to see with and their legs to 
measure with. With the acquisition of a 
measuring stick, mankind was on the 
way to sophistication. Many early cul- 
tures, such as the Chinese and the 
Maya, speculated about the earth, the 
sun, and the universe, but it was the 
Greeks who were on the right track. In 
the sixth century B.c., Pythagoras 
maintained that the earth was a sphere 
Earth 
and his contemporary Thales actually 
predicted an eclipse of the sun. Two 
hundred years later, influential men 
such as Plato and Aristotle established 
the sphericity of the earth by direct ob- 
servations: for example, of departing 
ships that seemed to sink below the ho- 
rizon instead of getting smaller to the 
point of disappearance, of the curve of 
the moon’s or Earth’s shadow during 
eclipses, and of the new stars that came 
into view as one traveled south. 
In the second century a.d. Claudius 
Ptolemy of Alexandria wrote two 
books, Almagest (on astronomy) and 
Geography. These were extremely use- 
ful as a collation of existing knowledge 
on these subjects, but in the process the 
author made two errors that persisted 
in damaging his reputation forever. 
First, he rejected the astronomer Aris- 
tarchus’s proposal that Earth rotated 
about the sun in favor of Aristotle’s 
Earth-centered universe, and second, 
he rejected Eratosthenes’ measurement 
of Earth in favor of a much too small es- 
timate by Poseidonius. He did, howev- 
er, postulate many rules useful to later 
surveyors and cartographers. For ex- 
ample, he insisted that all maps have a 
grid, he invented the term meridian, 
and he recommended dividing the lati- 
tudes and longitudes into degrees in- 
stead of fractions, for which we are all 
grateful. He defined the scope of maps 
accurately and said they should be “in 
just proportion,” that is, in scale. At 
this point the author interpolates a 
short discussion of scale that requires 
emendation. I quote: “Sometimes, par- 
ticularly on road maps, scale is ex- 
plained with a small ruler near the 
bottom of the map. This is a graphic 
scale.” A graphic scale, also called a 
linear scale, is not used just “some- 
times”; it is an absolute essential for 
78 
