586 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION H. 



It has been truly said that •' two heads are better than one." and we 

 shall hail the day when landowners desire the united services of 

 the three professions in designing and laying out their towns, but 

 until this auspicious time arrives we feel bound to respect the 

 ancient admonition, " Ne sutor ultra crepidam,^'' and not claim to our- 

 selves the right of designing all the houses as well as marking out 

 the lots on which they are to be built, while at the same time we 

 can scarcely be expected to concede that the designing of towns 

 belongs solely to the architectural profession, leaving to the 

 surveyor merely the privilege of driving in the pegs. 



Though Mr. Suhnan may smile at our ignorance of the history 

 of the professions, we are bound to confess our inability to follow 

 him when he refers to the •' honored positions we, the architects, 

 once occupied, but from which we have been too long excluded." 

 We wonder what happened to disturb this excellent arrangement, 

 and from what they have been excluded ? 



Mr. Sulman's remarks on this part of the subject lead us to 

 notice a tendency Avhich we have often observed : to blame 

 surveyors for all the blunders in sites as well as the badly laid out 

 towns that unfortunately exist, but a very little consideration will 

 show the injustice of this tendency. As a matter of fact, as we 

 have already pointed out, in private work the surveyor seldom or 

 never has any voice in choosing a site. In the days when all the 

 agricultural land around Adelaide was selling at so many pounds 

 per foot, if the surveyor had ventured to suggest pegging out a 

 spider's web on a square plot of land or the digging of holes to 

 prove the subsoil he Avould have been accounted a lunatic, and, 

 unless he had decided to retire from this kind of business, his busi- 

 ness would have quickly retired from him. We recollect one 

 surveyor who was employed to survey a township in the hills near 

 Adelaide, and who took such interest in his work as to lay out his 

 streets in faultless curves sweeping in easy gradients round the 

 contour of the hills. He has long sine-' abandoned the .scene of 

 his triumph, and seeks in distant lands that appreciaion of his 

 merits which they failed to arouse in South Australia. 



LEGISLATION. 

 In noting Mr. Sulman's remarks under this head we do not see 

 that No. 3, limiting the area to be included in a title, wuuld have 

 any practical elfect in preventing overcrowding, as fifty buildings 

 could be huddled together on one acre as well as on separate 

 blocks of one-fiftieth of an acre, and it would work hardship in 

 some instances; for example, we know of one case in Adelaide 

 where it was necessary to issue a title for a strip of land only oin. 

 wide. In most cases probably a strip like this tnight bo tacked on 

 to the adjoining land, but it might not always be convenient ; for 

 instance, the adjoining land might be mortgaged, and it would 

 then be undesirable to join the two pieces of land in one title. 



