ABSTRACT
The whole development of geography has been associated with cartography, and most maps are an accumulation of past experience, depending on the surveys and levellings of previous workers, except in the case of an initial or an entirely revised survey. In a recent paper, A. H. Robinson has said that 'the period 1835-55 might well be termed a "golden age" of the development of geographic cartography'. The modern advance of regional geography was made possible by the publication of various atlases that dealt with distributions both on a world view and for countries or smaller areas. This chapter considers atlases that were concerned mainly with the major distributions of climate, flora, fauna and man over the surface of the earth. Their primary aim was to give a world view, but their compilers were not unmindful of the local deviations, for example in mountainous areas.
