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culture of land surveying, geology, and chemistry is 

 essential to constitute a thoroughly qualified valuator. 



A knowledge of farming is indispensable. It discovers 

 the advantages, fitness, capabilities, inconveniences, and 

 defects of the soil. It detects those errors in practice, 

 which occasionally exhibit bad crops on good land, and 

 points out the true cause which gives an aspect of 

 luxuriance to an apparently inferior soil. If an injudi- 

 cious system of cropping prevail in a certain district, and 

 deteriorate the apparent value of the lands to a greatei 

 degree than the natural qualities of the soil would seem 

 to justify or if, on the other hand, superior management 

 and abundant capital impart, to certain farms, a degree of 

 fertility greater than the adjoining lands of the same 

 quality possess it enables the valuator to discriminate in 

 these difficult cases, and furnishes him with data to arrive 

 at a sound judgment, and neither to depreciate the one, 

 nor overrate the other. 



Some acquaintance with land-surveying is likewise in- 

 dispensable. The man who sets out to value land without 

 this, is reduced to the miserable expedient of averaging 

 the whole acreable contents of the farm, without data on 

 which to calculate how many acres are in any one class 

 of the various qualities it may contain. It is impossible, 

 therefore, to repose confidence in such a valuator, because 

 he has no sure grounds on which he can rest his own 

 opinions. The valuator who understands surveying is 

 enabled to define accurately, upon his map, the natural 

 demarcations between the varieties of soil met with in the 

 land he views, and to calculate their areas exactly on his 

 map. 



A knowledge of the general principles of geology is also 

 extremely desirable. The mountain masses of a district 

 reveal the constituents of the soil that covers the plain, 

 and before he enters upon it, the geologist has already 

 formed some idea of its character and value ; where he 

 sees dark blocks of trap-rock overhanging a limestone for- 

 mation, he expects to find the soil where their debris 



