Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/564

 terminus of each of these lines he was expected to leave some mark to distinguish the spot. This generally consisted of four blazes in a tree. The marks were frequently selected by mutual agreement between the owners of contiguous plantations, and after being properly witnessed were entered on record. The next survey that was made on the same stream began at a point where the previous base line ended, and as one of the side lines of the second plat had already been drawn in the survey of the first, the only work to be performed, in order to define the area of ground to be included in the second plat, was to lay off the base line and the perpendicular of the side of the unpatented lands. When the soil adjacent to the banks of a navigable stream had all been appropriated and converted into plantations, it was then the custom to sue out patents to the lands that were situated back of these estates, the line parallel to the base line on the stream being adopted as a new base line by the surveyor, and the whole process of defining new plantations being repeated according to the rules of action followed in the former instance.

Many disputes arose as to the limits of these surveys, and the ground of such controversies was in general principally attributable to gross defects in the surveys of the first series of plantations, defects which might in large part have been avoided if the surveyors had shown greater care in carrying out the details of their work. In the first place, no allowance seems to have been made in their computations for the deficiencies of their instruments. In the seventeenth century, the surveyor&#8217;s compass, like that of the mariner, was not graduated, and