1 34 On Land Surveys in the United States. 



of their profession. It is an opinion too prevalent with many that 

 the surveyor's art, as it is termed, is of easy acquisition, and may be 

 attained by an individual of moderate capacity, and very moderate 

 acquirements, in a short space of time. This impression is assuredly 

 a very erroneous one, and for the general good ought to be corrected. 

 It has been and is now often the case that young men who are but 

 imperfectly acquainted with the principles of common arithmetic, and 

 who by the cursory perusal of some of the ordinary treatises on sur- 

 veying, have acquired but a very superficial knowledge of the sub- 

 ject, are permitted to practice under sanction of such rules as our 

 state Legislatures have thought proper to prescribe. The result of 

 this incompetency is, that in some instances calculations of measure- 

 ment, instead of being made by a rigid and correct trigonometrical or 

 arithmetical process, are effected by such uncertain means as the 

 accuracy of scales, or of measurements made with dividers upon a 

 miniature draught or plan may afford. It is very frequently the case 

 likewise that many in making computations, are restricted as it were 

 to a mechanical use of the rules by which they arrive at results, and 

 as they have never been thoroughly inducted into the principles on 

 which those rules are based, are often at a loss or led into error when 

 a case occurs out of the ordinary course, or of a character different 

 from what they have been accustomed to meet with in practice. It 

 would not be difficult to specify numerous instances of these disqual- 

 ifications, but I shall content myself at present with mentioning only 

 one. In a certain township in New England where the lots are laid out 

 in the form of oblique angled parallelograms, the resident surveyor for 

 along time followed the method of casting or computing them as though 

 they were squares or rectangles, and he continued in this practice 

 until he was undeceived by an individual who was not a surveyor, 

 but who had common discrimination enough to detect the error. The 

 history of surveys in different parts of the country is replete with 

 examples of this character, but the one I have adduced will suffice 

 to illustrate the nature and extent of the class of evils to which it refers, 

 and I will proceed in the next place to notice some other evils which 

 result not so much from incapacity in the surveyors themselves as 

 from imperfections in their instruments. 



In comparing the instruments of different surveyors, particularly 

 their circumferentors, it is seldom that any two of them are found to 

 be constructed alike. The artist employed in their fabrication almost 

 invariably deviates in some respect from others he has seen, to favor 



