F. GEOGRAPHY. 2 37 



F. GEOGRAPHY. 



COAST-SURVEY MEASUREMENTS OF MERIDIONAL LINES. 



Mr. Hilgard, assistant in charge of the Coast Survey office, 

 has communicated to the American Association the general 

 results of the measurements made by the Coast Survey of 

 two meridional lines, one extending from Farmington, Me., 

 to Nantucket, and the other from the head of Chesapeake 

 Bay to Ocracoke, North Carolina. The result of his compari- 

 son between the measured lengths of these arcs and the com- 

 puted lengths, as deduced from the dimensions of the earth 

 given by Captain Clark, of the British Ordnance Survey, 

 shows an almost perfect accordance. It is thus demonstrated 

 that the curvature of the earth is sensibly the same both in 

 the eastern and western hemispheres ; or, in other words, we 

 may conclude that the earth is an ellipsoid of revolution, and 

 not an ellipsoid of three unequal axes, as has been maintained 

 by some. JV. T. Trib., October 31, 1873. 



THE TOPOGRAPHICAL CHARTS OF SWITZERLAND. 



Dr. Wolf, of Zurich, in a short contribution to the history 

 of the magnificent charts of Switzerland, pays a just tribute 

 to Feer, upon whom it seems the first conception of this great 

 work appears to have dawned. The earliest attempts at 

 charting the complicated topography of this region date as 

 far back as 1712, and subsequent editions of the maps, greatly 

 improved, appear to have been published in 1770 and 1802. 

 The latter chart, known as Pfyffer's, seems to have been in- 

 trusted to a person by the name of Weiss, who was not wholly 

 competent to the work, but labored faithfully to better the 

 chaotic condition of the older charts. The first application 

 of adequate trigonometric and astronomical methods dates 

 from 1795, when Horner was engaged by Kuster, a rich land- 

 owner at Reineck, to prepare an accurate topographical chart 

 of the valley of the Rhine. Feer, who was born at Reineck 

 in 1763, and studied the exact sciences at Zurich, Munich, and 

 Vienna, after visiting numerous observatories in Germany and 

 France, returned to Zurich in 1784, where he soon received 



