MAPS OF OLDEN TIME.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 52, 2 March 1929, Page 8 (Supplement)

MAPS OF OLDEN TIME.

THE WORK OF MERCATOR. Let us delve for a while into the history'of maps, writes A.B.L. in the London " Daily Mail," in connctiou with Mercator's birthday on December 5 last. Men have been mapping the earth— the part of it they knew —since first the geographers of Babylon drew their country's borders, four thousand odd years ago, on the clay tablets which may be seen in the British Museum. More than a century before the Christian era the Greeks had a globe (forerunner of the orb which is part of the King's regalia), on which they marked a rough guess at the world —America and Australia, by some prophetic insight, being included. We have in the British fluseum, too, our own Saxon map of the world, some eleven centuries old, which shows in one corner an L-shaped England, and in another the distant land "where lions abound." It is a far cry from the early picture maps and globes which we scan with delight to the sheets on which our Ordnance Survey shows the tiniest fieldpath and copse. One of the greatest advances in the fascinating science was made when Gerard Kremer, or Mereator, produced his first " projection " —term we still use— to show navigators their way about the world, setting out his longitudes and latitudes in parallel lines. At Louvain he began his map-making career, which lasted 60 years, but religious troubles (in the course of. which he narrowly escaped being hanged, beheaded or buried alive) drove him to Duisberg, in Germany, where a monument tells of the world's gratitude to the man who made geography easier.