A glance at the contoured or the shaded sheets of the Ordnance Survey's map of Scotland will show better than any verbal description the manner in which our Highland mountains are grouped.
Everywhere, therefore, throughout the region of the Southern Uplands, in hilly and low-lying tracts alike, we see that the land has been modelled and contoured by the agents of erosion.
In all maps that are to be contoured some plane, called the datum plane, must be used to which all contours are referred.
Skill in contouring comes only with practice but by the use of expedients a fairly accurate contoured map can be made.
The pre-glacial surface with smoothly contoured slopes is recessed in a noteworthy way from the ridge crest to the snowline of the glacial period at least a thousand feet lower.
It is to the plasticity of snow that we may look for an explanation of the smooth-contoured appearance of the landscape in the foreground of Fig.
In general the slopes are smooth-contoured and forest-clad from summit to base; only in a few places do high cliffs diversify the scenery.
The shales, therefore, offer many more points of attack and have weathered down into a smooth-contoured topography boldly overlooked along the contact by walls and peaks of granite.
If contoured maps are available it is easy to build up a strata-relief, which facilitates the completion of the relief so that it shall be a fair representation of nature, which the strata-relief cannot claim to be.
The scientific value of these contoured maps is fully recognized.
There also were stony masses buried beneath carpets of axidia and sea anemone, bristling with long, vertical water plants, then strangely contoured blocks of lava that testified to all the fury of those plutonic developments.
I distinguished the unpredictably contoured springings of a vault, supported by natural pillars firmly based on a granite foundation, like the weighty columns of Tuscan architecture.
Every officer is required, in this branch of the survey course, to design one or more works of defence for the occupation of a site, of which a contoured plan is furnished to him.
It is formed of an outer muscular layer, within which is a doubly-contoured lining, containing nuclei at intervals, which is probably of the nature of an epithelioid lining (Pl.
They consist of small vesicles with a very thick doubly contoured membrane, which are filled with numerous deeply staining spherical granules.
As contoured maps are originally prepared from actual surveys the draftsman should simply follow the copy furnished by the topographer or such original matter as may be given to him for redrawing.
On a hachured map that is made from a contoured map somewhat definite differences of elevation may be indicated by the intervals between the strokes, and abrupt changes in slope may be indicated by shorter and heavier lines.
The draftsman can best express it by this means after he has studied contoured maps or photographs of the region mapped, if they are available, in order that he may obtain an idea of the details of its topography.
More speedy is a slide contoured as a cycloid, the curve traced by a pencil fastened to the rim of a wheel as the wheel rolls along a floor beside a wall against which the pencil presses.
How teeth may best be contoured involves nice questions in geometry.
To ensure the utmost strength in the machines themselves they are contoured in ample curves.
Glass grinding tools are to-day so exquisitely contoured that a lens forty-two inches in breadth shows the image of a star as an immeasurable dot.
The grinding tools he employs he has contoured in such wise as to produce desired curves free from error.
Cephalis conical, armed with a bunch of strong, conical spines, and distinguished by double-contoured pores.
Cephalis hemispherical, with irregular double-contoured pores, about as broad as the bars.
The thick, double-contoured outer membrane is separated from the thin and delicate inner membrane by a clear space, filled up by jelly or by a fluid; the two are connected in Phaeocolla (fig.
Thorax inflate, campanulate, hyaline, only with three or four remote transverse rows of circular, double-contoured pores of equal size.
The surveys of the Coast and Geodetic Survey were contoured and described by Veatch and Smith (1939).
Shell very thick walled, with roundish, double-contoured pores of different size and form, twice to three times as broad as the bars; sixteen to eighteen pores on the half equator.
At the bottom of each pore a thin lamella of silex, perforated by four to six irregular, roundish, double-contoured porules.
This example merely shows how many important points in the history of our rivers will be made clear when the country is properly portrayed on contoured maps.
To those who must give first place to the quantity of relief rather than the quality, as, for example, the geologist or the engineer, a contoured map is now considered essential.
A slight modification of the latter method can be used to advantage when no contoured map is available, and when the points whose elevation is known are not numerous enough to permit the construction of one.
These methods are, in the order of their development, by hachured and by contoured maps.
It necessitates in the first place a good contoured map upon which to draw the sections, but sacrifices much of the advantage thus gained because only a number of points on each contour line are used, instead of the entire line.
A solid block of plaster is used,--the contouredmap being transferred to it--and the plaster is carved down to produce a series of steps like those made by building up the contours.
Excellent illustration of this is found on the "Piedmont sheet" of the contoured maps issued by the United States Geological Survey.
This can be done without materially affecting the accuracy of the model, considered even as a copy of the contoured map.
Upon a contoured map as a basis cross-section lines are drawn at small and regular intervals, and, if the topography be intricate, corresponding lines at right angles.
For the construction of a good relief map the first requisite is a good contoured map.
To illustrate the subject of contours to aid those who have difficulty in reading contoured maps the following is suggested: 1.
On a good many contoured maps a figure like this will be found in one of the corners: [Illustration: Scale.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "contoured" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
