Category: Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

“All the roots hang down
Swing from town to town
They are marching around
Down under your boots
Below the gopher holes
Where they all unfold
There’s a world going on underground
Underground”–Tom Waits (“Underground”, with audio)

Dirt isn’t just the stuff that one gets rid of, of course–it is the basis of all that we are. Varieties of dirt are the stuff of the connoisseur and the expert, and when laid out properly, and particularly in a scientific manner, dirt is exceptionally beautiful. For example, this exceptional and large illustration appears in the Atlas of American Agriculture, which was printed in a very unpretty/dustbowly year for soil, 1936.  (The image is clearer once you click in and expand.)

The lithograph is also available for sale at the blog’s bookstore, here. 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post–revisited and expanded

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This map may be simply named (“Mountains & Rivers”) but the information it displays is hardly so. As a matter of fact there are probably a thousand data points in this flowing, pleasingly-design comparative display of information–and the closer you look, the more there is. 

In the mountains section there are hundreds of pieces of data locating the elevations at which cities and towns are found, and the altitudes of the extent of different types of trees, and of course the comparative heights of enumerated mountains set off by the continents.  Above the mountains floats the fantastic display of the lengths of rivers, listing 43 in all, showing cities at the various stages of each river’s progress. 

It really is a glorious thing.

“Maps & Rivers” was printed and published by Johnson & Ward in 1862 and appeared in Johnson’s New Illustrated Family Atlas; there is at least one earlier version that appeared in 1856 with a different background and with ornate Celtic-inspired borders, though I prefer this version with the simple border and the full blue-sky-and-clouds background.  For my experience this is one of the richest of the genre published in the mid/late 19th century.

• The original map is available for sale at the blog’s bookstore, here. 
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JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

Before the Neil deGrasse Tyson version and update of Carl Sagan’s landmark television series, Cosmos, there was Alexander von Humboldt, and his enormously influential book of the same title, printed in 1845-1862.  Well, von Humboldt’s (1769-1859¹) book was actually Kosmos when published in German, which is where it started its life (and which von Humboldt suffered mightily for in it English translation), and in which this map appears.  Von Humboldt was enormously studied and educated and of a high scientific mind over many subjects, one of those 19th century figures who seemed as though they could know everything, a polymath of high order (along the lines of Goethe and von Helmholtz and Thomas Young and others).  He was a meteorologist and biogeographer before those sciences existed; a naturalist, geographer, archaeologist, and explorer, a natural philosopher of magnitudes.

• The original maps is available for sale at the blog’s bookstore, here.

Kosmos reflected his lifelong interest in order, and what he did was astonishing–he attempted to unifying the complexities of nature in one book (of five volumes), binding the various branches of science together in a cohesive whole, attempting to show how the laws of the universe acted here on Earth.  It was a very influential work, very progressive, a masterwork of scientific method.  Kosmos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 144 (from 2008) expanded

Understanding the Mississippi River was the skeleton key to understanding pre-Civil War America.  There was really nothing else quite like it—the Ohio River and the attention paid it by Collot and others  was of great importance to understanding the early far Western (east of the Mississippi River) adventures of Colonial and Post-Revolutionary America, as was the Missouri to early 19th century American exploration and settlement, but the Mississippi loomed over all.  Like saying that Babe Ruth was a fabulous baseball player or that Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist is a bland statement of the obvious—the understatement hollowing and becoming more brittle the more deeply their “records” are studied showing how truly incomparable they were—the Mississippi, “The Father of Waters”, is really the Big Deal in the history of the U.S. 

And in spite of the fantastic maps made of river through the 18th and 19th centuries (like these gorgeous and iconic examples by John Senex in 1721 (A map of Louisiana and of the river Mississipi [i.e. Mississippi] : this map of the Mississipi [i.e. Mississippi] is most humbly inscribed to William Law of Lanreston, esq.)  or Robert Sayer  (Course of the river Mississippi, from the Balise to Fort Chartres; taken on an expedition to the Illinois, in the latter end of the year 1765. By Lieut. Ross of the 34th regiment: Improved from the surveys of that river made by the French. in 1772, or even Coloney & Fairchild’s Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters (below, a whopper, measuring in at 337 cm (and which was issued on a wooden spool for the use of travelers on board steamships moving along  the river), there were very few that gave you an idea of the *history* of the river.

That was achieved in spectacular flourish by  Harold Fisk (in the map above) in 1944 in his Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River (U.S. Department of the Army, Mississippi River Commission, 78p) The map showed the very ghost trails of the river over time, and trying to show where it wasn’t was the great question.  He tried to reveal the history of the valley by mapping  and dating all physiological features of the river and tried to reconstruct the channel changes with what were to become speculative appreciation.  Nevertheless, he did make a tremendous attempt at explaining the courses of the Mississippi over time by utilizing his own excellent maps and a little generative thought.  This might not be the most accurate map of the courses of the Mississippi over time, but in 1944 it was really a spectacular achievement in cartography and general thought.  And the thing was just drop-dead beautiful.

Here’s another sample from the suite of maps:

[Source: http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/climate/mississippi/fisk/plate_15-1.pdf]

And another detail, from map 15, in the vicinity of Baton Rouge:

• The full text is available here from the LSU library: http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/climate/mississippi/fisk/fisk.htm

• For a very quick, elegant overview see Radical Cartography which has all 15 of the maps displayed at once, along with a key chart :  http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?fisk

• Also go to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers site and click on the “Fisk oversize” link in the left-hand “documents” column:  http://lmvmapping.erdc.usace.army.mil/index.htm

 

Lloyd’s new map of the Mississippi River from Cairo to its mouth:

[Source: Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/item/99447107/]

And the great “Ribbon map of the [Fa]ther of Waters.Created / PublishedSt. Louis, Mo. : Coloney & Fairchild, 1866”: 

(Very zoomable version here:  http://www.loc.gov/resource/g4042m.ct000797/  The initial image comes up about 4mm wide (1)–don;t be discouraged, just start clicking away at the magnifier and it will zoom right in…)

Mega-long scroll follows: