FIND SKULL OF HUGE OX THE 'HE skull of an ox with horns measuring eight and one-half feet from tip to tip has just been taken from the and in these, hanging vines and different small plants are growing. The baskets are all different; one is of rustic design, another of wicker, and on the one in the illustration the coat of arms of the city is shown. The baskets are low enough so that they do not hide the graceful globe lights or break the symmetry of the lamp-. posts as seen at night when the lights are turned on. THE GREATEST KNOWN Ox This record breaking skull was found in the famous California asphalt bed which was a graveyard for thousands of prehistoric animals. famous La Brea asphaltum pits in the County's concession west of the city of Los Angeles. The directors of the County Museum say that nothing like this bison has ever been seen. The directors believe the ox lived in the Pliocene Age, some 250,000 years ago. "It is the largest specimen ever discovered," said Director Frank S. Daggett of the County Museum. "Only parts of the skull have been found, but we hope to find the entire skeleton. Such a discovery would be an immensely valuable contribution to science, and would give the museum a priceless treasure as well." It is believed that if all of the ox is dug out and mounted, it will reach nearly to the ceiling of the museum. The ox was found snug up against an imperial elephant. FLOWER BASKETS ON LAMPPOSTS THE Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles has adopted a very pretty idea in decorating the lamp-posts in front of its building. Beneath the globe lights, flower baskets are hung around the post A "CITY BEAUTIFUL" IDEA The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce has trimmed the lamp posts in front of its building with flower baskets. AND SWAMPS IN THE WILDERNESS By A. M. L. PHILLIPS N a big, light, cheerful room in the Division of Surveys quarters in Washington, D. C., many men sit or stand at large drawing boards and work quietly, day after day. Every line is drawn to a certain scale with strange little zigzags, dots, dashes, and whorls. They indicate mountains and valleys, plains and marshes, lakes, rivers, and fields. These men are map-makers, but there is not much romance in that sort of thing. The romance of mapmaking falls to the lot of the field force, the surveyors, who have been the pathfinders for civilization. With tents, guns, ammunition, and food supplies, the real map men start out into the wilderness. Sometimes they are months away from civilization. They are the men who make the measurements. Distance from point to point "as the crow flies" is an extremely simple matter and a very small part of their work, for every ridge of land, every hollow, every chain of mountains, and every valley must be taken into consideration. The exact depressions and elevations have to be recorded. In fact, everything that comes to view along the landscape must go down into the surveyor's notebook. HOW THE PEAKS ARE FOUND WITH A DRAG This drawing shows how obstacles, small but dangerous to navigation, are discovered by the map makers. Running a boundary line for a state, county, reservation, or mineral tract is a simple thing, but a general field or topographical survey means that everything in the landscape from a mighty snowcapped mountain to old Bill Jones' house at the fork of the roads must be set down on paper. Suppose, for example, a man wished to leave his little New England farm and go west. He has been told that Montana offers splendid opportunities for the ambitious farmer. If the man is wise he will not depend altogether upon the word of anyone, but will write to the general land office at Washington, naming one or two townships he has in mind, and they will send him maps. These maps will be complete pictures of the country. They will show the timberland, creeks, riverlets, ponds, ravines, and everything else that goes to make up the literal face of the earth in that township. The men who first went out through those sections with flour, bacon, fryingpans and surveying instruments strapped. on pack mules, knew the romance of map making. If there was a mountain in their way, they had to climb it to learn its altitude. If there was a river across their path they had to make soundings to learn. its depth. Sometimes for weeks they would sleep in tents with several feet of snow on the ground. No matter how sheer the side of a ravine or how jagged the overhanging crags of a precipice, the surveyors had to be lowered into the one or "boosted" up to the other. These surveyors with their rodmen and other assistants do not, as many might believe, come back to their tent or shanty or farmhouse or wherever they are making their headquarters, and sit down at a drawing board and make a picture of the result of their day's surveying. Instead of this, as they go along foot by foot over the land, the surveyors make careful notes. To the uninitiated their notes are no more intelligible than the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian obelisk. Here is a sample of a surveyor's notes: Chain 72.50 Scattering timber, N. 60 E.&S. 60 W. Set iron posts for secs. 25, 26, 35 and 36. Marked. T 15 N. S 25 on N.E. quadrant. Intersect E. bdy of Tp. 3 lks. N. of cor. of secs. 25, 30, 31 and 36. Set iron post 3 ft. long, brass cap for witness cor. to 4 sec. cor. marked W C 14 S 35 on W. and 36 on E. face; pits N. and S. of post. Chain 79.98 Chain 39.50 If it is land-office work, these notes, which are really reports, are sent in to the Surveyor General of the State. All the figures and computations are verified by the clerical force of the office and a rough drawing is made. This rough drawing, together with the verified field notes, is then forwarded to Washington and the work is given to the map-makers in the Division of Survey. These mapmakers may never have been outside of the District of Columbia. That does not matter in the least. Their work is purely technical. They can read these notes as readily as a baseball fan can read a score board. After the drawings are made the maps are reproduced by photo-lithographic process, that is, by photographing on stone from which the editions are printed. At the same time, duplicate and triplicate copies are prepared for the autograph signature of the Surveyor General. This is the last step in map-making. The signature vouches for the accuracy of the maps. After that these three original copies are stored in three different places, so that in case of fire or other accidents the only original sets of maps will not be lost. There is a difference in the process of map-making between that in the Land Office Department, just described, and in the Geological Survey, in that the men working in the Geological Survey draw their maps on the field. At present, this office is engaged in a tremendous undertaking, that of making a topographical atlas of the United States. Although the work was begun in 1882, less than forty per cent of the public area of the country and our outlying possessions has been mapped. The overhanging tree solved the problem of where the surveying instrument could be placed. There has been plenty of adventure and romance in this work. The field men have clambered over glaciers and toiled up over the perpetual snows of our mountains in the Northwest to set their tripods on the barren. peaks, and they have floundered. through moccasin - infested swamps in the semi-tropics and planted their surveying instruments in the morasses on specially made tripods with legs fifteen to eighteen feet in length. Their progress has been interrupted many times because the areas are widely distributed. Already every State is represented by some completed portion of this topographical survey. The atlas is being published in sheets of convenient size and is con structed on varying scales. The scale for desert land is four miles to the inch, while for many cities, it is an eighth of a mile to the inch. The average, however, is about two miles to the inch. In 1898, reconnaissance work was begun in Alaska and today only a third of that area has been mapped. There is always work for the map-makers. Until a few years ago we had no really good maps of the Hawaiian Islands. Today, our surveyors are busily at work there and the maps of some of the districts have already been completed. Hawaii offers some extremely difficult problems for the surveyor, as some of the valleys are among the narrowest in the world. The Kaluanui Valley is an example, where there is a fall of nearly two thousand feet in a distance of less than twelve hundred feet. These atlases show three features: water, relief, and the works of man. Water includes seas, lakes, rivers, canals, and swamps. Relief, or land, includes mountains, hills, valleys, and plains. The works of man include cities, towns, roads, railroads, bridges, and boundaries. Three WORKING UNDER A "TROPICAL" SUN The map makers sometimes feel as if they were at the Equator. This is a California scene. colors are used-blue for water, brown for land, and black for the works of man. There are several departments of the Government that issue maps, the Bureau of Soils, the Weather Bureau (for they even map the sky), the Bureau of Agriculture, the Postoffice Department for post routes of the States, and the War Department, showing fortifications, etc. It may be readily understood why the War Department's maps are not made (Continued on page 264) |