SURVEYS AND MAPS 29 



Gill's scheme was accepted by the Government, and in 1905 

 the geodetic framework of the Union of South Africa was com- 

 pleted. Unfortunately very little was done to fill in the framework 

 with primary and secondary triangulation, neither was legislative 

 effect given to the recommendations of the 1878 Commission. Con- 

 sequently the Government found it necessary to appoint a second 

 Commission in 1921 to enquire into the unsatisfactory state of 

 survey affairs in the Union. 



This Commission opened its report with the following statement: 

 'The Commission cannot state too emphatically that the present 

 system of land surveying is unsound, inefficient, expensive, and 

 without finality'; and (in paragraph II, 5) 'the system involves 

 the community at the present time in an unnecessary expenditure 

 on farm surveys alone of, we estimate, approximately ^£"50,000 a 

 year'. 



The importance of the geodetic survey to property surveys is 

 expressed by the Commission (in paragraph III, i) as follows: 'The 

 history of the survey of a country follows the same course in every 

 land. All governments experience the same difficulties in the first 

 settlement; security of title and other advantages cannot be guar- 

 anteed because the country is not properly surveyed; on the other 

 hand, the proper survey cannot be carried out because the land 

 value does not justify the necessary expense; hence we find in every 

 country initially the system of isolated surveys. As the country 

 develops and the land becomes more valuable, the system of sur- 

 vey leads to litigation about boundaries, to increased interest on 

 money advanced on mortgage of land, and renders the civil and 

 military administration of the country expensive and unsatisfac- 

 tory. In the end the government of the country is compelled to 

 establish a scientific system in order that development be not 

 retarded. Legislatures, whose members are mostly laymen in sur- 

 vey matters, have everywhere shown a disinclination to face the 

 facts of the survey situation, because the substitution of a scientific 

 system entails the scrapping of the work of generations. The longer 

 the scrapping is delayed the greater is the waste. In South Africa 

 each surveyor engaged upon a survey measures his own base, and 

 resultant therefrom, millions of bases have been measured, all of 

 varying standard; this is one of the main causes of error in survey 



