When the map has been turned into the proper position—­that is to say, “oriented”—­the next thing is to locate on the map your position.  If you are in the village of Easton and there is a place on the map labeled Easton, the answer is apparent.  But if you are out in the country, at an unlabeled point that looks like any one of a dozen other similar points, the task is more complicated.  In this latter case you must locate and identify, both on the map and on the ground, other points—­hills, villages, peculiar bends in rivers, forests—­any ground features that have some easily recognizable peculiarity and that you can see from your position.

Suppose, for instance, you were near Leavenworth and wanted to locate your exact position, of which you are uncertain.  You have the map shown in this manual, and, looking about, you see southwest from where you stand the United States Penitentiary; also, halfway between the south and the southeast—­south-southeast a sailor would say—­the reservoir (rectangle west of “O” in “Missouri").  Having oriented your map, draw on it a line from the map position of the reservoir toward its actual position on the ground.  Similarly draw a line from the map position of penitentiary toward its actual position.  Prolong the two lines until they intersect.  The intersection of the lines will mark the place where you stand—­south Merritt Hill.

This method consists merely in drawing on the map lines that represent the lines of sight to known and visible places.  The lines pass through the map position of the places you see and are parallel to the actual lines of sight; therefore they are the map representations of the lines of sight, and their intersection is the map position of the eye of the observer.

After this orientation and location of position, one can deduce from the map everything there is to know in regard to directions.  In this respect, study of the ground itself will show no more than will study of the map.

After “What direction?” comes “How far?” To answer this, one must understand that the map distance between any two points shown bears a fixed and definite relation or proportion to the real distance between the two points.

For instance:  We measure on a map and find the distance between two points to be 1 inch.  Then we measure the real distance on the ground and find it to be 10,000 inches; hence the relation between the map distance and the real distance is 1 to 10,000, or 1/10000.  Now, if the map is properly drawn, the same relation will hold good for all distances, and we can obtain any ground distance by multiplying by 10,000 the corresponding map distance.

This relation need not be 1/10000, but may be anything from 1/100 that an architect might use in making a map or plan of a house up to one over a billion and a half, which is about the proportion between map and real distances in a pocket-atlas representation of the whole world on a 6-inch page.  Map makers call this relation the “scale” of the map and put it down in a corner in one of three ways.