108 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



active in Sumeria) we will take him first in Africa. He dates back, here, 

 to the earliest days of Dutch settlement at the Cape. Naturally in the 

 busy times of the great trek his work was of the sketchiest. He improved 

 with the times and with competition. He became subject to certain State 

 inspections ; presently he had to show certain diplomas ; he turned into 

 the ' licensed surveyor.' In his native land (the Dominion of S. Africa) 

 he has never made a map, but he has first-rate education in instrumental 

 surveying and can deal readily enough with a least square adjustment. Then 

 presently the Rhodesias, British East Africa, and the West Coast colonies 

 began to call for his like, and he came. With him came others trained in 

 similar schools for similar work from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, 

 but, with very rare exceptions, never from England. Here, at home, 

 large scale surveying had been taken over by the State, and the profession 

 was extinct. Thus were born the Colonial Survey Departments of Africa, 

 just as they had been in earlier times in Ceylon and Bermuda, in Jamaica 

 and Mauritius, in British Guiana and Hong Kong, although in these 

 surveyors from England took more part. 



Fortunately for colonial expansion, there have been, generally, Royal 

 Engineers somewhere handy. To them we owe the first roads, railways, 

 cathedrals, government houses, town-planning, canals, and, of course, 

 maps. It was part of our policy in former years that there should be, 

 always, a large number of these Royal Engineer officers on survey work, 

 and every ex-Director-General of the Ordnance Survey still surviving 

 found his topographical training at that duty. In a small part of Hamp- 

 shire within a circle of some eight miles radius live the three who had 

 most to do with framing our very successful, war surveys. Between them, 

 in their earlier years, they surveyed in almost every part of Africa. Such 

 Royal Engineer officers, sometimes on the Colonial pay-roll, sometimes on 

 that of the War Office, sometimes drawing partly from both, but always 

 chosen and directed (even if indirectly) by the Geographical Section, 

 began the topographical mapping of Africa. 



A third element appears, however, before the fusion of property and 

 topographical surveying. In Great Britain the Ordnance Survey was 

 always greatly helped by the Astronomers Royal. Airy, for example, was 

 one who was closely in touch with its development. The Astronomer 

 Royal in Cape Town early in this century was Sir David Gill, and it was 

 due to his energy and persistence that the geodetic triangulation of South 

 Africa was undertaken and completed. His great ambition was to see it 

 carried on through the heart of Africa till, joining up with the Egyptian 

 tri angulation, it should form a continuous arc, roughly along the meridian 

 of 30 E. of Greenwich. It is noteworthy that most of the officers con- 

 cerned in the measurement were Royal Engineer officers lent by the War 

 Office. The great arc will appear again and again in considering the 

 recorded geography of Africa because its prosecution and completion are 

 entirely vital to any reasonable survey of East Africa. As we all know the 

 Isle of Wight could be mapped on a basis of a little plane trigonometry, 

 but Great Britain required a primary triangulation. We never boggled 

 at the triangulation inevitable for India, and yet with all this African 



