58 
Frank Carney \ 
i 
The need of good maps in the schools was cogently amplified I 
before this Association one year ago.^ The best maps of home { 
areas available are those issued by the U. S. Geological Survey; | 
the more extensively they are used, the less will be the demand for r|| 
mediocre maps. ji 
Industrial activities. The State supplements of many school ll 
geographies usually give special attention to industrial activities; ,j 
often maps are used in showing the distribution of areas of cer- |i 
tain natural products, of the several lines of manufacturing, or ! 
particular phases of agriculture, etc. Some of this information 11 
is rendered obsolete or incomplete in a very few years; other data, ! 
usually illustrating the organic part of geography, appear, so that > 
no matter how satisfactorily these phases of geography were treated 1 
in the original edition of the supplement, they are shortly out cf i 
date. Two or three years often witness marked changes in the | 
activities of many localities. The fact that there has been a ! 
change is not so important in geography as the reason for the ! 
change. It is mainly in the industrial lines that innovations arise. i 
The publishers of State supplements can not be expected to inves- | 
tigate and announce these activities with the promptness and | 
thoroughness desired. State Geological Surveys can do this; | 
furthermore, their efforts are not constrained by mercenary inter- 
ests as with competing publishers. 
Field work. Some years ago the New York Survey published 
a Guide to Excursions in the Fossiliferous Rocks of New Fork 
State. This little bulletin is a type of publication that other 
Surveys might adopt, greatly to the advantage of geography. 
While the schools of each region must depend largely on the imme- 
diate locality for illustrative field work, at the same time each 
State possesses some features, valuable for study but localized, 
which should be generally known. 
A thickly populated part of a State suggests several lines of 
investigation which a Survey can treat without in the least dis- 
couraging the initiative of local teachers. It is seldom that a 
city is so completely self-developed that a study of its factories, 
etc., does not at once lead into relationships of environment, active 
^ Cyrus C. Adams, Bull. Am. Geog. Soc., vol. xxxix, p. 6, 1907. 
