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22   Life and Letters of Francis Galton

But Galton wanted more than the accuracy of the ordnance map, he wanted a pictorial map, a bird's-eye view of a coloured model.

-It is hardly to be expected that travellers should always find it advisable to draw up for publication large pictorial charts of the routes they have travelled, but duplicates of their sketiches and surveys would be a very valuable acquisition to the records of Geographical Societies, where they could be studied by map-makers, who wished to compile a pictorial chart of the country in which they lay. It would, I should think, be a very interesting task to endeavour to map a district on this method, and the result would be sure to be a gratifying one, if the traveler had the eye and the touch of an artist'. The strictly accurate, but meagre information that is afforded to a student by ordinary maps is more tantalising than satisfactory. A blind man fingering a model could learn as much from his sense of touch alone, as they convey to our eyes. They are little more than an abstraction, or a ghost of the vivid recollections with which the memory of the traveller is stored, not that these recollections are very varied or shiftingone image succeeds another in rapid changes-but that the somewhat stereotyped survey which the mind recalls when it attempts to image to itself the features of a once-visited country, is a matter of colour and blaze of sunshine, and dancing waters and quaint crags or well-marked headlands, and here and there stretches of level land clothed with russet forests or lying open in tawny plains. It is surely not too much to expect that at least some allusion to these features --which are everything to the memory, which are precisely what every traveller whom we address is mentally referring to as his map, whilst he answers our questions-should find a legitimate place even in the highest and driest system of topography'."

In abort Galton wanted geological and vegetational information added to the maps then in vogue, and he thought it possible to combine a graphic picture with a sufficiently faithful ground-plan. He had great hopes from the art of colour lithography then being rapidly developed'. Galton's reuses were keenly alive when travelling and he remarks in this paper that France, Switzerland, Germany and almost every European country has its pervading smell, and its pervading sounds, all widely alien to the experiences of our own mother-country. It was something of the impressions of all this local colouring which Galton found so painfully missing in maps.


"be made intelligible and interesting to the general public of educated men" (!). In the first volume, besides papers by Galton's friends Charles Astor Bristed, the American (see 3tsawrr;es, P 77), and Charles Buxton (Ibid. p. 69), there were papers by Liveing, Fitzjaznes Stephen, and W (1!. Clark (IbitL p. 70) alas a dose intimate of Galton. The .Essays thus were the product of Glalton's close contemporaries, if they did not actually spring from his entourage. I have failed to find who really set them going.

' Calton refers in this matter to popular coloured bird's-eye views of the Crimea and Baltic, poor in execution, but supplying a distinct want. $e notes also Ziegler's geological nape.

a .Lie. tit. p. 97. Eighteen years later a letter to George Darwin shows that Galton's thoughts were still working on the same lines. After referring to projecting mouldings on maps to represent mountain chains, modelling from'successive contours, Galton continues:

"I have often thought of procuring a really artistically made and coloured globe [elsewhere he suggests one of 9 feet diameter and once had much correspondence about it. Buskin wrote a very good letter. It seems to me that one might set to work by making a spherical shell, cutting it up into conveniant parts like a p»zzle map, and mount the parts that were temporarily wanted to be consulted on a convex table. These could be multiplied by casts, also by electrotype." (British Association, Bradford, Sept. 24, 1873.) The last sentence shows that Gelton intended his globe to be a model of the world's arsrJheA not a mere map.

s Seventeen years later Galton proposed at a council meeting of the Royal Geographical Society that the interest on the Murchison Fund be expended this year (11872) ire procuring specimens of, and a report on, the various styles of cartographic representation now in use both in England and abroad, as regards shading, colours, symbols, and method and cast of production, but not as regards projection, and that a committee should be appointed to arrange particulars.