Geographical reviews: The Atlas of Finland

Summary

The review assesses the Geographical Society of Finland’s Atlas of Finland, dated 1925 because most of its statistics refer to that year, against its 1899 and 1910 predecessors. It reports that an English edition replaces the French 1910 edition; map explanations appear in Finnish, English, and Swedish, with a separate single-language text volume. Articles by subject-map editors and responsible bureau heads explain the maps’ sources and interpret their contents. The reviewer particularly praises the detailed vegetation and population map and the data assembled for it, notes the regional maps’ potentially controversial approaches to defining regions, and describes trade maps showing values per inhabitant of trading countries. Numerous maps cover public services and economic and social activities. Compared with 1910, statistical tables move to the text, an index is added, and smaller maps allow a greater map count on fewer pages without, in the reviewer’s judgment, reducing usefulness. The review praises the atlas overall while criticizing avoidable English translation errors, the predominance of block shading over dots in distribution maps, and poorer paper that weakens the clarity of color and type.