NEW MAPS FOR OLD. T HE critic who remarked that the
chief need of the Board of Agriculture was the addition to its staff of a trained journalist may possibly be wondering whether his reflections reached official ears. He was a journalist himself, and should be expected to know what he was talking about. What he meant was that the Board of Agriculture of the day, although composed of admirably well-qualified officials who worked with the utmost energy and determination, yet failed to produce an appreciable effect upon an unthinking public. The public was expected to apply for information, rather than be supplied with it. Information was not withheld, but it was difficult to obtain; many, conse- giuently, would not persist in asking for it, and occa- sionally, when it had been obtained, it was found to be indigestible. A farmer surveying a blighted crop has little use for a pamphlet whose sentences are full of what is to him meaningless Latin. There, the critic suggested, a trained journalist might assist the scientific official, and iii the matter of pamphlets and information things have become better with succeeding years. But the criticism might have been extended. It might have been made to apply, not merely to agriculture, but to other activities presided over by the Board. Map-making should have one of them. Not everybody realises, probably, that in addition to the sea and fresh-water fisheries of England and Wales and the Botanical Gardens at Kew, the Board Of Agriculture supervises the operations of the Ordnance Survey Department. When that is realised, there is less tender that in the past the obtaining of a good Ordnance Map should ever have been a matter of difficulty. The difficulty has occasionally been irritating; but during the past few months change has been followed by improve- ment,—an improvement perhaps worth comment. The amateur of English Ordnance maps arrives at an understanding of their natural history, so to speak, only after considerable experience. Up till quite recently the first stage in arriving at such an understanding was the difficulty attending au attempt to buy one. The stranger or traveller desiring to obtain a good map of the district would ask at a bookseller's for an Ordnance map, and fail to obtain it. He would be offered a local publication, or perhaps one of Bartholomew's excellent reductions or reproductions of the Ordnance maps, but the original thing was not to be had. In many places the difficulty of obtaining the original is still as great as it was; the Ordnance Survey Department do not profess to have organised sources of local supply. They state their limitations on some (not all) of the editions of their publications. You learn that "Ordnance Survey maps can be purchased from agents in most of the chief towns; through many head post-offices in other towns; directly, or through any bookseller, from the Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton." The modesty of the undertaking is irreproachable; the objections to the limited supply are obvious enough, the chief being that a map is nearly always wanted quickly, on the spot, and that if a good map cannot be had the next best must be made to do instead. Suppose, however, that your determination to obtain an Ordnance Map is sufficiently great to induce you to order one direct, or to instruct a bookseller to order one,. from the Department, the distracting question immediately arises which map to order. Suppose you want a map showing you the country for five miles surrounding a town in Wiltshire, for example. You decide that a map on the scale of one inch per mile will be the size for your purpose, and then discover that there' is no means of finding out which map to ask for. You have a one-inch map of a district in Surrey with you, perhaps, and consult it hoping that there may be some guidance as to the districts to which other snaps .belong. There is none, except for the districts actually adjoining the map in your band. All you can do is -to read once more through the "Rules for Ordering" printed on the cover, and learn from so•doing that in ordering maps direct from the Ordnance Survey Office " the scale, country, and the sheet numeral should be quoted." which is precisely what you cannot do, and you are asked to state whether "the outline, or the hill-shaded, series is required, or the coloured edition., folded in covers Or flat." But the map you happen to have with you belongs to a hill-shaded series, and is also, apparently, a coloured edition, and how should there be a difference between folded maps and flat ones? These difficulties multiply. The Ordnance Survey Department are evidently Making new departures. In the first place, they have appointed-a sole wholesale agent (Mr. T. Fisher Unwin, 1 Adelphi Terrace, W.C.) for the sale of their maps, and it is much easier in consequence to purchase them. Messrs. Smith's bookstalls 'provide them, end can even supply plans showing the ignorant which map be needs, which is a consider- able step towards getting it. Next, the Department have decided upon a new series. It is an admirable series, known technically as the "large sheet with layers," and the main point is that the height of any particular section of country can be seen at a glance; the different heights are in different colours. The Department have evidently realised, what Messrs. Bartholomew and other makers of orographical maps discovered some time ago, that the average person does not read a map with the ease and skill of the accomplished engineer, and that in substituting colours for the various contours they are making the map infinitely more intelligible to the general public. The tourist can see by a single glance where the high ground lies, where the river valley runs, whether the roads pass. by gaps through the hills, or whether he must go over or round them. "Dark brown; that. means the hill is eight hundred feet high," lie can say to himself in a moment, or—" The colours shade very gradually there; that must be an easy ascent " ; or, if he is generally surveying a country with the possible idea of settling there, he can tell whether the sur- rounding ground is flat or billy in this or that direction, what sort of a view he would get east and west, and so on. Nothing could well be better; the maps are sure of miiny buyers. If, in addition, it could be brought to the notice of more booksellers "in most of the chief towns" and more "post-offices in other towns" that there are no better maps of England in existence than those issued by the Ordnance Survey Department, and if, as a consequence, the maps were more often stocked and easily obtained, that also would be a great advantage. While the Ordnance Survey Department are embarking on fresh adventures they might add very greatly to the value of every map they send out by revising the letter- press printed on its covers. The maps themselves are excellent, and testify to the industry and abilities of the officers responsible for their preparation. But the descriptions of the maps supplied, and the directions for obtaining them, are about as puzzling and confused as they well could be. There are various editions of these conundrums, and the descriptions and rules vary with the editions. In the latest series, "with layers," which we have just noticed, the maps are described under nine headings. Number two is "General Cada.stral map on a scale of trAtr, or about 25 inches to a mile." This kind of map appears in the "Rules for Ordering" printed opposite as "General Map (25 inch scale)," which is apparently the same as "Parish Maps (25 inch scale) " of another edition, and on an Irish map is described as " Townland Map on a scale of 25 inches to a Mile. This shows areas of all fields, also levels and bench marks, but no contours." In each edition the Rules for Ordering add, with an equal lack of lucidity and grammar : "The county, scale, and sheet numerals (two, e.g., 47.10) should be quoted, and whether coloured or uncoloured impressions are required." That helps nobody. We have already pointed out the helplessness with which the would-be purchaser must regard all rules for ordering when lie can by no means discover what he wants to order. The remedy is exceedingly simple, and is to be found on maps which, like Bartholomew's, are reproduced "by permission from the Ordnance Survey." Let the Survey Department add to each map of a district a miniature map of the whole of, say, England or Wales, as the case may be, showing the numbers and names of the districts covered by other maps of the same size, or even of other sizes. Then every map issued would contain all necessary information for ordering other maps. If, in addition, the descriptions of all maps were made uniform and more intelligible, and the rules for ordering were made simpler, the better for the public and the reputation, high though it be, of the Survey Department. Incident- ally, the money made by an increased sale of the maps would find its way back into the public purse, and that, we imagine, would also be regarded by the Department as a public benefit.
Previous page
