on_exactitude_in_science.txt

... In that empire, the art of Cartography reached such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the whole of a city, and the map of th empire took up an entire province. With time, those exaggerated maps no longer satisfied, and the Colleges of Cartographers came up with a map of the empire that had the size of the empire itself, and coincided with it point by point. Less addicted to the study of Cartography, succeeding generations understood that this extended map was useless, and without compassion, they abandoned it to the inclemencies of the sun and of the winters. In the deserts of the west, there remain tattered fragments of the map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in the whole country there are no other relics of the geographical disciplines.