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Memoir on the Indian Surveys. 



[April 



sionally a degree of dissimilarity to each other, which leaves the com= 

 piler quite at a loss on what principle to reconcile their discrepencies. 

 The repetition of such surveys serves only to increase perplexity, where 

 some even of the principal towns and geographical features are most 

 unceremoniously shifted several miles, while their exact position is still 

 matter of doubt, if happily he should not find them in two places wide 

 apart. 



Such, anterior to the commencement of the great trigonometrical 

 survey in Great Britain, was the only method in general use, and it will 

 not be out of place to mention that there were then errors in the positi- 

 ons of some important points, as the Lizard, to the amount of seven mi- 

 nutes of a degree, and that many of the best county maps exhibited 

 blunders of three miles in a distance of less than twenty. 



The various surveys throughout India and in Bengal, to a still later 

 date, have, with few exceptions, been conducted in like manner, and 

 the maps of districts under the latter presidency have, in consequence, 

 been proportionally erroneous. To remedy this defect has long been 

 desired, but it is a task not easy at first sight to determine how a 

 measure fraught with so many difficulties is to be etFected without an 

 extravagant outlay of money. 



The great map of India constructed by Colonel Reynolds was formed 

 also on the foregoing principle. One extensive line of route running 

 through several degrees of latitude from Goojerat to Hindoostan, and 

 corrected where it terminated on either side by observations of 

 latitude, having been measured with considerable care, constituted a 

 primary basis, to which other routes diverging on either hand were 

 referred, and the intermediate spaces filled in from native infor- 

 mation, or the labours of his assistants. Colonel Monier Williams, 

 Sir James Sutherland, and other officers. This was until very lately 

 the foundation of the entire map of Cutch, Kattywar, Goojerat, Hin- 

 doostan, and Rajpoothana, corrected at times by route measurements 

 under his successor Colonel Monier Williams. The expense of this 

 imperfect geography from first to last has been incredibly great, but 

 the reputation of Colonel Reynolds' system and of his successors in 

 office stood so high with the Bombay government, that every sug- 

 gestion for improved and more conclusive surveys was invariably nega- 

 tived as superfluous. 



A collection of routes and other information collected by Colonel 

 Kelly, and suggestions for the improvement of the south of India, by 

 Lieutenant-Colonel Gent, chief engineer at Madras, on the 28th 

 January, 1784, followed up by a large and valuable compilation of 



