2 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VII., No. 152 



out sufficient reason. Congress is asked by the 

 convention to -organize a civil bureau of public 

 works ' in a certain way, and for certain reasons. 

 It is difficult for an onlooker to interpret the way 

 and reasons, otherwise than that the army engineers 

 are in possession of a good thing which some of 

 their civil brethren covet : hence the intervention 

 of congress is invoked to change the established 

 order, to put the one class out and the other in, 

 or, if this may not be, that the good thing be at 

 least divided. The reasons given are weak, and 

 open to dispute, some easily refuted ; and the re- 

 quest that the basis of organization of the pro- 

 posed bureau should be studied and reported on by 

 a board consisting of seven members — three mili- 

 tary engineers, three civil engineers, and a lawyer 

 — savors quite strongly of place-making for some 

 of the leaders in the movement. All this is un- 

 fortunate. There are strong and good reasons 

 why the organization for the conduct of public 

 works should be recast, just as necessity for re- 

 organization has been found in other departments 

 of administration. That these reasons exist is 

 proven by the fact that a letter from the chief 

 of engineers, U. S. army, General Newton, was 

 read at the meeting, expressing sympathy with 

 any move which would better the public ser- 

 vice. The betterment of the public service 

 ought to have impressed itself upon the Cleve- 

 land meeting as being the only ground upon 

 which they could go before the country with 

 reasonable expectation of being listened to. In- 

 stead of this, the convention considered the 

 question as one of class, and seeks to secure class 

 legislation in a way which is itself a suggestion 

 that congress is incapable of doing its own work. 



THE COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY. 



The time was long ago when any one would 

 think of asking what is the use of having any 

 coast survey at all, — one might almost say, long 

 past, w hen any one would expect that the work 

 of .such an organization could ever be brought to 

 an end. As originally constituted, by the act of 

 1843, the organization was empowered to proceed 

 with the accurate mapping of the Atlantic and 

 Pacific coasts of the United States, — a work which 

 involved a trigonometric survey of the coast-lands 

 to be conducted with the utmost precision. This 

 formed also the only suitable basis for the hydrog- 

 raphy of the coasts. 



Those interested in the thorough prosecution of 

 this work were not slow to appreciate the obvious 



advantages of connecting the independent surveys 

 of these coasts into a single homogeneous system. 

 The surveys of individual states might thus be 

 supplied with the precise deteraiination of points 

 for their own topographic and geologic work, and 

 the entire domain of the United States be covered 

 by a net-work of triangles of the utmost accuracy. 

 The foundations of this vast work were laid nearly 

 fifteen years ago ; and in its execution natural 

 precedence has been given to those regions where 

 there was the most urgent call for the work. 

 Such a connecting-link is a necessary part of a 

 survey of the ' coasts and adjacent islands, etc., of 

 the United States,' as originally provided for by 

 law. in order to bring into harmony the measure- 

 ments along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. As 

 Professor Hilgard has pointed out, this is suffi- 

 ciently obvious to allow the belief that it would 

 have been specified in the original law, if, at the 

 time of its enactment (1807), the country had had a 

 ' western coast.' 



But this is not all : what is the obvious require- 

 ment of the law has led, in addition, not only to 

 the incidental accomplishment of important sci- 

 entific results, but also to many advantages of the 

 most practical significance. To appreciate the 

 former, we need only recall that our national 

 domain extends in an east and west line over 

 about one-eighth of the circumference of the 

 entire earth, and that the accurate measurement 

 of this line, as undertaken by the survey, will 

 constitute much the longest arc-parallel ever 

 measured for determining the size and figure of 

 the earth. The same survey will afford accurate 

 elevations of a multitude of points above a com- 

 mon datum plane, and will show the relation of 

 the mean level of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

 From a purely scientific stand-point, these would 

 be reasons enough for completing the transcon- 

 tinental survey as originally outlined ; but let us 

 see what some of the practical advantages of the 

 work are. To begin with, this already well- 

 advanced scheme of a national survey, from 

 ocean to ocean, provides every subsidiary state 

 survey with an accurate base-line. How impor- 

 tant this is will appear if one attempts to conjoin 

 the hitherto existing surveys of adjacent states. 

 Discrepancies of many miles are frequent ; for 

 example, "The best maps of the states of Ohio, 

 Indiana, and Kentucky, constructed upon inde- 

 pendent data, when put together, leave no delinea- 

 tion of the Ohio River. Between the land-survey 

 maps of Illinois and Missouri, the Mississippi River 

 presents in places wide lakes, while in others it 

 entirely disappears." The transcontinental link 

 also adjusts the lines and points of the public 

 land surveys, and furnishes the necessary data 



