[To TILE EDITOZ OF TEE SPECMPOR."1 SIR, — It is to be
feared that the Survey Department have awakened about a dozen years too late to make much pecuniary gain by their belated spurt of energy. The maps they are now publishing are really excellent, and also handy to hold and consult ; but Bartholomew by superior energy and intelligence "collared the market" years ago. And even now, after all this effort, if you take the new Ordnance map, say No. 29 (St. Albans), and lay it beside Bartholomew's No. 25, the verdict will, I feel sure, go " agin the Government." I bold no brief for Bartholomew. I have no interest in his business, except the deep and abiding one of having bad my life for many years made far pleasanter by travelling (mostly on foot) under the guidance of his admirable maps over many hundreds of miles of beautiful English ground. I seldom take a walk without one in my pocket. Art and poetry are to be found within the four corners of these highly sug- gestive sheets, and the experienced pedestrian (or cyclist) can construct a fairly accurate picture of what he is going to see and enjoy by an intelligent study of these green and brown con- tours. " Here," he will say, " is a bridge over a brook, and after. wards I see the road gradually mounting by woodland country, beginning at deep green, and rising through lighter shades of green to light brown, and to a summit level of, say, eight hundred feet, from which the prospect cannot be other than glorious, as the contours show that the land once more falls away to another river valley." It is a characteristic of Government Departments to lag behind the times (as we shall find when and if they take over the railways). I suppose it is a law of their being. Still, let us be grateful to them for having, even at the eleventh hour, begun to make us a few good maps, and even to divulge the secret of where they can
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