A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE GEOGRAPHIC WORK OF 

 THE U. S. COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY* 



By T. C. MendeiXHAll, LL. D., Ph. D., etc., 



President of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute;, and formerly Superintendent 

 of the Coast and Geodetic Surcey, Washington, D. C, 



■ AND 



Otto H. Tittmann, 



Assistant in Charge of the Office of the Survey 



"While a relatively small part of the energies of the United 

 States Coast and Geodetic Survey has been devoted, since the 

 creation of the Bureau in 1807, to geographic exploration, it is, 

 perhaps, only just to say that in the character and amount of its 

 precision work it is second to no simila.r organization in the world. 

 From the very start the standard of work has been the highest 

 attainable in the existing condition of the arts and sciences on 

 which such work must depend, and often, not content with that 

 condition, the Survey has made it its business to better it by orig- 

 inal investigations of the first class, leading to improvements in 

 the instruments and methods of the highest importance. It thus 

 became the principal and for many years almost the only bureau 

 of the Government in which exact science was cultivated. In its 

 outward activities it was essentially an organization for the prac- 

 tical application of science to the solution of certain problems 

 and the issue of certain publications which were of the utmost 

 value to commerce. 



The duties to be performed by it were to sound the depths of 

 the ocean along the coasts of the United States, to define the shal- 

 lows which barred the wa3's of commerce, to delineate with great 

 accuracy the shores and phj^sical condition of the thousand har- 

 bors and estuaries with which a benign Providence has blessed 

 our coasts, to investigate the tides and currents of the waters 

 which bear their precious burden of human lives and property 

 to and fro, and to study the mysterious variations and uncertain- 

 ties of the magnetic needle by which the course of the navigator 

 was largely directed. 



*Read before the Geographical Section of the British Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science, Toronto, August 2.3, 1897. 



294 



