When General Hamilton spoke in the Federalist over a century ago of "an empire, in many respects the most interesting in the world," meaning the United States of America, he did not, he could not, foresee the vast growth of his country and its northern and southern neighbours which this book portrays. The volume is the third in a series of small atlases, meant to cover in turn the whole globe, and to do it in a way to knit up geographical and historical knowledge with the facts of commerce and the literary record of each land or region. One chief purpose of these maps is to trace clearly the development of the United States, beginning with "the most remarquable parts" of the New England of the Pilgrim Fathers, described by Captain John Smith in 1614, and not forgetting the territories of the old American-Indian nations. Some inkling too is given in facsimile of the early charts, views, and maps by the explorers and cartographers who made a survey of the first settlements. For example, we have an old map of Guiana invaluable as a Sir Walter Raleigh record, giving the mouths of the Oronoke, or Orinoco, where his men tugged against the stream, and stretching southward to the Amazon itself, and we get from the map of Peru at the period of the Conquest a clear idea of the country in the time of Pizarro.

As with the great rivers, so with the great American cities. You can compare "old New York," as represented in one page, with the new New York and its environs which are a world's wonder to-day. Then again you can take the chart of the Early Highways that ran westward into the wilderness and estimate how the power of the engineer has, since the railway came, caught the States in an iron network and rearranged the Americas. Battlefields and sieges, by which the right of the new country to its national life and individuality was "wrenched," as Tennyson said in his address to the old country,[1] are not forgotten.

Note among the less familiar documents that we are able to include, the rare map of the territory in Virginia and North Carolina traversed by John Lederer in his three marches. Lederer was sent out by Governor Berkeley in 1669-70, and journeyed west as far as the top of the Apalatoean mountains. It seems doubtful how far he went in South Carolina. He did not penetrate far enough, according to Professor W. J. Rivers, to meet "the new-comers who were about founding the Commonwealth of Locke."

As for the local associations that have become familiar in American literature, you have a chart of the Concord neighbourhood showing Walden Pond, Forest Lake, Lexington, and Punkatasset Hill, associated with the name and fame of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and H. D. Thoreau. Fenimore Cooper recalls the old Indian Territory as it was in the wild prime of the Red Men; and you travel from the land of "Hiawatha" in Longfellow's poem southwards to the Mexico and Peru of Prescott, and then pause over something more amazing than any record in imaginative verse or prose—the plain statistics figured in the map of South America, and the emergence of Buenos Ayres with its million and a quarter inhabitants, Rio de Janeiro with its 860,000, San Paulo with 350,000, and Santiago with 330,000. Here are the elements of an immense new Latin civilisation which is going to count, and count enormously, just as China and its millions are bound to count enormously in the twentieth century.

We might have spoken at large of Canada and its huge dominion; of Newfoundland, New Brunswick, New "Scotia," and the chain of the Great Lakes in the North. But an Atlas speaks for itself with the accent of a world-bearer if one treats its pages as they ought to be treated, with a sense of the great perspective of history and of men and nations advancing along it to their fulfilment in the world. The Old World and the New have lately been drawn closer by the mysterious nerves that underrun the Atlantic and the understanding of a true world polity; and it is hoped that this volume will do something to foster that amity between states and nations.

We have again to acknowledge very gratefully the indispensable help given to our enterprise by Dr. Bartholomew with his unfailing knowledge and skill. Also to thank Miss Edwardes for her working gazetteer which makes reference easy, and Mr. G. C. Brooke of the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum for his notes on the coinage, and for his arrangements of the specimens which serve so vividly to illustrate the historical side of the atlas.