The science of geography Is different from biography: Geography is about maps, Biography is about chaps. The rhyme might have been taken further to show how closely, nevertheless, these things are linked. For while maps are the biographical treatment of geography, biography is the geographical treatment of chaps. Chaps who are made the subjects of biography have by effort, or by accident, put themselves on the contemporary map as geographical features; but seldom have reality by themselves as proper chaps. So that _Who’s Who?_ though claiming to be a dictionary of biography, is hardly less of a geographical gazetteer than _Burke’s Peerage_.... One of the few simple people I have known who have had a philosophic contempt for such gazetteering was Old Joe, a battalion quartermaster in France. He was a proper chap. When he had won his D.S.O. for being the only quartermaster in the Seventh Division to get up rations to his battalion in the firing line at, I think, the Passchendaele show, he was sent a slip to complete with biographical details for the appropriate directory. He looked contemptuously at the various headings. Disregarding ‘date and place of birth,’ and even ‘military campaigns,’ he filled in two items only: Issue . . Rum, rifles, etc. Family seat . My khaki pants. And yet even proper chaps have their formal geography, however little it may mean to them. They have birth certificates, passports, relatives, earliest recollections, and even, sometimes, degrees and publications and campaigns to itemize, like all the irrelevant people, the people with only geographical reality. And the less that all these biographical items mean to them the more particularly and faithfully can they fill them in, if ever they feel so inclined. When loyalties have become negligible and friends have all either deserted in alarm or died, or been dismissed, or happen to be chaps to whom geography is also without significance, the task is easy for them. They do not have to wait until they are at least ninety before publishing, and even then only tell the truth about characters long dead and without influential descendants. * * * * *