THE ILLUSTRATED UNIVERSAL GAZETTEER.* THE compilers of gazetteers, like the
makers of atlases, are very painstaking, and, on the whole, improve ; but they still do not quite understand what the public want them to do. In the first place they make huge omissions. A gazetteer to be useful wants maps, even a little atlas of maps, not scattered through the book, but arranged alphabetically at the beginning. They should not be broad maps, those horrible things on thin paper, which are put into McCulloch's publications and Bradshaw's Guide, and which tire the hand when they are opened and tear when one attempts to refold them. They are of no use what- ever unless lined with linen, and when so lined they never fold up into any shape which a librarian, with an eye to his book-case, can by any possibility tolerate. Till somebody in- vents the next desideratum, a paper as thin as the ordinary sort, but which will not tear, or break, or catch scrofula, gazetteer maps should be of the size of the page, and drawn in skeleton style, with rivers, mountains, boundaries, and capitals occupy- ing most of the space. A gazetteer like this one, for example, wants about ten pages of map, the world on litereator's projection, but with only its countries, and mountains, and rivers marked, occupying two. That is for measuring routes. Then a map of Western and another of Eastern Europe, of Western and Eastern Asia, of Africa, of Australasia, of North and South America, would occupy eight pages, and pretty nearly exhaust the world. If each covered two pages instead of one so much the better, because so much the more space. Then the main statistical facts which everybody is bound to know and nobody ever knows—geography being taught in English schools by some inconceivable rule of thumb—should be added at the beginning in the form of alphabetical tables. The use of a gazetteer is to make reference easy, and it is not easy when one wants to know only the population of Ispahan to read a column and a half of rubbish intended for a pictorial description. If a table of travel- ling distances, calculated from Greenwich, were added, it would be of material use to that enormous class who have no notion of finding the distance between London and Shanghai except by put- ting a slip of paper across a map, and so fixing an estimate in their minds equal to about two-thirds of the truth. Lastly, with every point in statistics, the date of the calculation, unless, like area, it is unalterable, should be added. What is the use of giving the population of London as it was in 1861, or of guessing at that of India as it was supposed to be by the civilians who
* Illustrated Universal Gazetteer. Edited by W. F. Ainsworth. J. /Lauren and Co.
invented Oriental statistics at the end of the last generation? We know this is asking a painful, perhaps an intolerable sacrifice
of the publishers. It must be so annoying, when the merits of a really good gazetteer are discovered some five years after publi- cation, to find the sale stopped by the remark, " Oh ! the figures are all so old ;" but we are just now suggesting the means to make a perfect and not merely a paying work. These little matters once settled, which belong rather to book-making than geography, the compiler should settle with his publisher the necessary scale of the work. There is nothing more difficult.. Gazetteers can never be very dear, because if they are they get out of date, and people will not buy them ; and yet, if they are cheap, the tendency is to make them too small. Our own impres- sion is that any compilation of the kind in which any name whatever is not found is at once pronounced by its disgusted owner a "discreditable publication," and that it would be bettes to give latitude and longitude, area and population, all in a single line, than to omit the name entirely. Places only change their circumstances, they rarely cease to exist, and an exhaustive- gazetteer once compiled by men with as little contempt for Tartary as over reverence for England would serve like a skeleton map for any future index. Indeed, the gazetteer's. notion that very obscure places may be very safely left out is a demonstrable fallacy, for it is for them, and them only, that gazetteers are required. People have a fair notion of Paris ; it is about Sevres that they want to know facts, and they can tell the importance of Italy, when at sea about the area or Ecuador. The exhaustive system is, we believe, the true one, and there are the means for it now ; but, at all events, let there- be a scale adopted of some kind. Otherwise the compiler- may make the blunder conspicuous in this otherwise very good gazetteer—he may insert names up to L, of a kind which,. after that letter, are very quietly dropped. There are just 1,040 pages in the book, but the first 600 do not carry us over the letter D, and had the scale not been ,altered 3,000 would have been required. Up to the end of D, for example, it was part of the idea to give every English village—a capital notion ; but after that letter the plan was found a little- too large, a fact which might have been conveniently discovered before. At least, we hardly know on what system a gazetteer is arranged which gives Barnardiston and Hundon, very small villages in Suffolk, but omits Witham, a pretty large market-town in the same neighbourhood, or Melford, a bigger parish than either.. Thescale should be fixed, so as not to give Calymnos, for example,. quite as much space as Corsica, and so should the information, which, as a principle, should never be pictorial, and very rarely include small local facts such as institutions, which seldom survive the edition which gives them honourable place. As a rule, the information in the one before us is valuable, and brought closely up to date ; and in a long list of references to places of which we had personal knowledge we discovered but one serious error. The pictures are an absurd surplusage—who looks for plates in works like these ?—and the scale has been somehow or other muddled; but it is, nevertheless, one of the best which have been issued of late years. Add forty pages of maps and con- densed information such as we have suggested, and the man of business, writer, or newspaper reader, need have no better reference for the rough facts so often wanted and so often forgotten.
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