The atlas of Poland by E. de Romer

Emmanuel de Martonne reviews Eugène de Romer's 1916 Geographical-Statistical Atlas of Poland, compiled during the war with geographers and statisticians and financed by Polish credit associations under the auspices of the Galician provincial diet. Its 32 plates cover historical Polish lands, mostly from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with legends and commentary in Polish, German and French. Economic and ethnic geography predominates. De Martonne examines its systematic use of equal-value curves: these give clear geographical overviews, but imply continuity across abrupt human-geographical contrasts, especially where administrative averages cover excessively large areas in Russian Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania. He discusses relationships between population density and arable land, industrial concentrations in Silesia and around Warsaw and Łódź, and the distributions of Poles and Catholics. He praises the atlas as documentation already useful for political and economic questions at the Peace Congress and as a lasting source on Poland and its neighbours.