COMMITTEES ON BEHALF OF THE GOVERNMENT 223 
pointed on May 25, and the remaining two a little later. The 
personnel was as follows: F. A. P. Barnard (chairman), J. H. 
Alexander, Wm. Chauvenet, J. F. Frazer, J. E. Hilgard, Joseph 
Winlock, Alexis Caswell, J. H. C. Coffin, Arnold Guyot, Ben- 
jamin Peirce, |... P: Lesley, J.D. Dana. 
The report of the committee, which was handed in on January 
9, 1864, more than seven months after its appointment, occupies 
fifteen pages, and treats of the different aspects of the publication 
of the charts and sailing directions considerably in detail. It 
begins with a brief account of the size, number and character of 
the publications which were examined, and then discusses the 
purposes which they appeared to have been intended to serve. 
It points out that up to the year 1858 more than 200,000 copies 
of the “ Wind and Current Charts” and 20,000 copies of the 
“Sailing Directions” had been distributed, from which it 
resulted that the publications and their compiler, Maury, had 
become widely known. 
After showing that although the publications were primarily 
intended to serve practical ends they had, nevertheless, been 
regarded in part as containing the results of scientific investiga- 
tion, the committee discusses them from both points of view. 
Its opinion regarding both the scientific and the practical 
merits of the publications was unfavorable. On the scientific 
side, the opinion of the committee, which was fortified by quota- 
tions from the French writers Bourgois and Lartigue, was that 
the generalizations contained in the Sailing Directions did not 
follow from the data collected, that many of the data were left 
out of consideration, and that the principles enumerated were 
not correctly based. 
On the practical side, the opinion of the committee was that 
while the data presented were valuable, the form in which they 
appeared was such as to confuse rather than aid and inform the 
navigator. 
The committee sums up as follows: 
“The original idea of these publications was a good one; it is the manner of its 
execution that is faulty. It was fitting that the laborious analysis of ships’ records 
