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XII. 



THE LANSDOWNE MAPS OF THE DOWN SURVEY. 

 By the EAIil. OF KEREY, D.S.O. 



Read Febiiuauy 23. Published August 25, 1920. 



In modem parlance, a siu'vey almost necessarily implies a map, but this was 

 not so ill the seventeenth century, and, although a good deal of Ireland had 

 been "surveyed" before the year 1654, there were few maps then in existence. 

 It was Petty who in that year first proposed to measure the whole country 

 "by instrument," and to set it "down" upon paper. His undertaking thus 

 came to be referred to at the time as a " down " survey,^ and it has been 

 called by that name ever since. 



Rather more ihan a hundred years ago the Irish Records Commission, 

 instituted in 1810, issued their reports on the Down Survey, and on such of 

 the maps connected with it as were then known to be in existence- 

 Some forty years later, in an appendix to his paper on the same subject,' 

 read before the Irish Academy, Mr. W. R. Hardinge undertook an exhaustive 

 classification and analysis of these maps in the light of fresh discoveries 

 which he had made in the interval. 



Meanwhile, in 1851, Petty 's "History of the Survey/' together with his 

 "Brief Account" of the same subject, had been for the first time published- 

 from the original manuscripts by Sir Thomas Larcom. 



Both the Records Commission and Hardinge hinted at the possible 

 existence of maps other than those they had dealt with, but neither they 

 nor, indeed, their then owner, were actually aware of a most important 

 collection, which, after lying hidden for upwards of a century amongst tiie 

 papers of successive Marquises of Lansdowne, has at length come to light. 



' The term was not first used, as suggested by Hardinge, in 1658. It appears in 

 both the reports of the Committee on Dr. Petty's proposals, Oct. 31 and Dec. 25, 165-1. 

 History, pp. 14 and 41. 



- Third Report on the Public Records of Ireland, pp. 495-543, and Eighth Report, 

 pp. 14-32 and 032. 



3 Transactions of the Royal Irish .\cadcmy, vol. xxiv. Antiquities, 1862. 



R.I.A. PKOC, VOL. XXXV, SECT. C. [50] 



