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, J. 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 



