BY the courtesy of its owner, Mr. E. Zaehnsdorf, we have been permitted to examine and display at the Society's House a striking example of Elizabethan cartography which has hitherto escaped the notice of students of early English maps. It represents the harbour of Rye as it was in those days together with the various waterways debouching thereinto and the country in its near neighbourhood. It bears the date 1594 and, though unsigned, may with confidence be attributed to the noted surveyor and map-maker, Philip Symonson, of Rochester, author of the first at all adequate map of Kent as a whole, with roads inserted, bearing the date 1596, the eastern half of which was reproduced in the Society's recent collection of engraved county maps (No. Io of the set) from the unique copy of the original issue owned by Canon G. M. Livett. For its careful and pleasing style of execution the Rye map may rank with the best specimens of MS. map-work of the Elizabethan period, and as the surviving examples of this are all too few deserves somewhat full consideration. In putting together the following notes we have had the advantage of data kindly supplied not only by the owner himself, who has been at some pains to establish its authorship, but of two competent authorities on the history of Rye and its neighbourhood-Mr. L. A. Vidler, author of a history of the place published only last year, and Dr. F. W. Cock, of Appledore in the adjoining part of Kent, who has long devoted himself to a study of Kent antiquities, and to whose sagacity the first suggestion of Symonson's authorship must be credited. Besides his published map of Kent, finely engraved by the Englishman Charles Whitwell (one of the few who down to that time had begun to emulate the work of Dutch and Flemish craftsmen), Symonson has been known for various local surveys, three of which still exist in MS. and are preserved among the archives of the Bridge Chamber at Rochester. They were briefly described by the late Sir George Fordham at the Leeds Meeting of the British Association in 1927, in a paper printed in this Journal in January 1928 (vol. 71, pp. 50 et seq.). As there mentioned, Symonson was Mayor of Rochester in I597/98, and held the post of Surveyor and Manager of the Bridge Estates from 1592 till his death in 1598. None of the three plans is signed, but their authorship is vouched for by entries in the Rochester Archives recording payments to Symonson for these very plans, while all agree in style, both as regards the script and other details. The most important is that of the Manors of Nashenden and Little Delce, near Rochester, owned, with other lands surveyed by Symonson, by the Bridge Wardens, and this has been courteously lent to the Society for exhibition side by side with the Rye map. Its style shows such a close resemblance to the latter as to afford a cogent argument for identical authorship, apart from other evidence to be shortly dealt with. From a detailed comparison of his map with the Rochester plans, Mr. Zaehnsdorf seems justified in finding agreement in the following particulars (in many of which, we may add, the engraved county map closely follows suit). The ground contours are similarly drawn, while churches, houses,