xiii 



advised to resort to the coast, he persevered with his task, having a convic- 

 tion that his absence would be fatal to its prosecution. 



Colonel Everest returned to India in 1830, enabled to effect improve- 

 ments in the survey, for he had made himself acquainted with the 

 practice of the English Ordnance Survey, and with the best methods em- 

 ployed in Geodesy in other parts of Europe ; besides which the Directors 

 of the East-India Company had furnished him with the best instruments 

 that could then be constructed. His labours and responsibilities were 

 now largely increased ; for in addition to his post as Chief of the Trigono- 

 metrical Survey, he had been appointed Surveyor-General of India. In 

 1832 he resumed operations on the great arc, from which date it was 

 diligently carried on until its completion in December 1841 by the remea- 

 surement of the Beder base-line by Captain "VVaugh 



In this renewal of observations, one of Colonel Everest's principal diffi- 

 culties was the training of assistants. In some other respects the fatigue 

 and risk were mitigated ; by the use of proper signal-lights, the surveying 

 could be carried on at night and during the hazy period of the hot winds, 

 whereby the parties were less called on for exposure during the rainy 

 season. The chief himself was so indefatigable, that his contemporaries, 

 playing on his name, were accustomed to speak of him as Neverrest. 

 "With his improved instruments, he was resolved to improve the Survey 

 and tolerate no inferiority in the execution. On this point he writes, 

 " If I have had any reason to suspect any defect in the instrument, or any 

 instability in the platform, or any want of precision in the signal observed, 

 or even if I have found in drawing up the angles that they presented any 

 discrepancies for which I could not account, I have always felt not only 

 that I was at liberty, but that it was incumbent on me to reject the whole 

 set bodily, and replace it by an entirely new set of angles taken under 

 circumstances free from objection." 



With these concluding operations an arc of meridian more than twenty- 

 one degrees in length had been measured by the two persevering chiefs of 

 the Survey and their assistants, extending from Cape Comorin to the northern 

 border of the British Possessions in India. Colonel Everest had speculated 

 on carrying it further, beyond the Himalayas and across the wild regions to 

 the north, until it struck the Russian triangulation within the dominions 

 of the Czar. An arc stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Polar Sea 

 would, indeed, as he himself describes it, have been ''a vast project." 



In 1843 he quitted India, and residing thenceforward in England, he 

 brought out in 1847 his great book in two volumes quarto, * An Account 

 of the Measurement of two Sections of the Meridional Arc of India, bounded 

 by the parallels of 18° 3' 15"; 24° 7' 11"; and 29° 30' 48".' In this 

 work, published also at the cost of the East-India Company, such particu- 

 lars are set forth as will enable a scientific observer to test the manner of 

 working and the results obtained, and full explanations are given of 

 ^ Now Major-aeneml Sir A. Scott Waugli, F.E.S. 



