1841 EARLY HISTORY OF SURVEY 37 



the country, and that the work which he was himself 

 voluntarily undertaking at his own charges would be 

 more efficiently performed in connection with the 

 general Trigonometrical Survey of the country. Ac- 

 cordingly, having laid his views before the authorities, 

 he was in 1832 appointed by the Board of Ordnance 

 ' to affix geological colours to the maps of Devonshire 

 and portions of Somerset, Dorset, and Cornwall.' 1 His 

 work thus obtained official recognition. 



By the beginning of 1834 De la Beche, acting 

 under the direction of the Board of Ordnance, had 

 produced a geological map of the county of Devon 

 which, as remarked at the time by Greenough, ' for 

 extent and minuteness of information and beauty of 

 execution has a very high claim to regard.' 2 He 

 worked with such rapidity that by the end of that year, 

 of the eight sheets of the Ordnance map on which he 

 had been engaged, four had been published, three were 

 complete, and the eighth nearly complete, while the 

 explanatory memoir and sections were far advanced. 3 



Next year (1835) an important step was taken in 

 the official recognition and assistance of De la Beche's 

 labours. Owing, no doubt, to his own representations 

 on the subject, the Ordnance authorities were led to 

 consider the question of the geological work which he 

 had been carrying on under their sanction, and to take 

 the advice of distinguished experts in regard to it. 

 Their action and its results cannot be better told than 

 in the following quotation from the address of Lyell as 

 President of the Geological Society in February 1836. 



Early in the spring of last year an application was made by 

 the Master-General and Board of Ordnance to Dr. Buckland and 



1 Proc. Geol. Soc. i. p. 447. 2 Op. cit. ii. p. 51. 



3 Op. cit. p. 154. 



