1108 REPORT—1885. 
measured. The value of accurate maps of individual properties, with every boundary 
clearly and exactly laid down, was not thought of in India in those days, and 
indeed has only of late years began to be recognised by even the British Govern- 
ment. The idea of a general geographical survey never suggested itself to the 
Asiatic mind. Thus when Englishmen came to settle in India, one of their first 
acts was to make surveys of the tracts of country over which their influence was: 
extending ; and as that influence increased, so the survey became developed from a 
rude and rapid primary delineation of the broad facts of general geography, to an 
elaborately executed and artistic delineation of the topography of the country, and im 
some provinces to the mapping of every field and individual property. Thus there 
have been three orders or classes of survey, and these may be respectively designated 
geographical, topographical, and cadastral; all three have frequently been carried. 
on part passu, but in different regions, demanding more or less elaborate survey 
according as they happened to be more or less under British influence. There is: 
also the Great Trigonometrical or Geodetic Survey, by which the graphical surveys 
are controlled, collated, and co-ordinated, as I will presently explain. 
Survey operations in India began along the coast-lines before the commence- 
ment of the seventeenth century, the sailors preceding the land surveyors by 
upwards of a century. The Directors of the East India Company, recognising tke 
importance of correct geographical information for their mercantile enterprises, 
appointed Richard Halluyt, Archdeacon of Westminster, their historiographer 
and custodian of the journals of East Indian voyages, in the year 1601, within a 
few weeks of the establishment of the company by Royal Charter. Hakluyt gave 
lectures to the students at Oxford, and is said by Fuller to have been the first to 
exhibit the old and imperfect maps and the new and revised maps for eomparison 
in the common schools, ‘to the singular pleasure and great contentment of his 
auditory.’ The first general map of India was published in 1752 by the celebrated 
French geographer D’Anyille, and was a meritorious compilation from the existing 
charts of coast-lines and itineraries of travellers. But the Father of Indian 
Geography, as he has been called, was Major Rennell, who landed in India as a 
midshipman of the Royal Navy in 1760, distinguished himself in the blockade of 
Pondicherry, was employed for a time in making surveys of the coast between the 
Paumben Passage and Calcutta, was appointed Surveyor of the East India 
Company’s dominions in Bengal in 1764, was one of the first officers to receive a 
commission in the Bengal Engineers on its formation, and in 1767 was raised to the 
position of Surveyor-General. Bengal was not in those days the tranquil country 
we have known it for so many years, but was infested by numerous bands of 
brigands who professed to be religious devotees, and with whom Rennell came into 
collision in the course of one of his surveying expeditions, and was desperately 
wounded; he had to be taken 300 miles in an open boat for medical assistance, 
the natives meanwhile applying onions to his wounds as a cataplasm. His labours 
in the survey of Bengal lasted over a period of nineteen years, and embraced an 
area of about 800,000 square miles, extending from the eastern boundaries cf Lower 
Bengal to Agra, and from the Himalayas to the borders of Bandelkand and Chota 
Nagpur. Ill-health then compelled him to retire from the service on a small 
pension and return to England; but not caring, as he said, to eat the bread of 
idleness, he immediately set himself|to the utilisation of the large mass of geogra- 
phical materials laid up and perishing in what was then called the India House ; 
he published numerous charts and maps, and eventually brought out his great work 
on Indian Geography, the ‘ Memoir of a map cf Hindostan,’ which went through 
several editions ; this was followed by his Geographical System of Herodotus, and 
various other works of interest and importance. His labours in England extended 
over a period of thirty-five years, and their great merits have been universally 
acknowledged. 
Rennell’s system of field-work in Bengal was a survey of routes checked and com- 
bined by astronomical determinations of the latitude and the longitude, and a similar 
system was adopted in all other parts of India until the commencement of the present 
century. But in course of time the astronomical basis was found to be inadequate 
to the requirements of a general survey of all India, as the errors in the astrono- 
