ABSTRACT
One suspects that the young ladies on the advertisement, who said they did not trust maps, were complaining more about the ability of their male companions to make something of the 'wiggly lines on the map'. Of course, no map can perfectly depict reality, but in not doing so it is all the more useful. The only perfectly faithful depiction would be an identical copy of reality itself. The reasons are not far to seek. Reduction in scale, the loss of the third dimension, human artifice in the creation of the representation, and the inability to read the depiction perfectly satisfactorily are the most important. Although some of the secrets of nature can be unravelled without maps, patterns over relatively large areas are often best detected and problems identified by careful studies of maps (Wooldridge and East, 1951, p. 65). The same authors observe, with envious sympathy, that 'a quick-witted mobile urchin may in one sense "know his geography" as he conducts us by tortuous by-ways from station to hotel, but neither he nor we have any adequate picture of the pattern of the town, without the benefit of maps' (195 1, p. 65).
