Page:Petty 1851 The Down Survey.djvu/358

 caused maps to be made of every barony or hundred, as also of every county, engraven on copper, and the like of every province, and of the whole kingdom."

The "other instructions," page 48, which relate chiefly to the office work, are equally clear and judicious, and some of their particulars are worthy of remark. The first is susceptible of illustration, a few of the rough plots remaining still, with the other Records, in the Paymaster of Civil Services' Office. They are on sheets of squared paper, graduated at the edges for protraction, obviously printed from engraved copper-plates, bearing date, and the name H. Sutton, well known to all who are familiar with the instruments and mathematical works of that time. The barony maps being on such a scale as shall keep them on a single sheet of paper, is similar to the practice of the recent Ordnance Survey, in which the County Index Maps were, in like manner, made on such scales as should bring each within a single sheet, for the obvious reason that if they were on such an uniform scale as should make any of them extend over more than one sheet, an index to the index would become neessarynecessary [sic], and if the scale of the largest county were adopted for all, the smaller counties would be insignificantly small.

The precaution in the fourth section, of having the check-work performed by people who were paid by the day, was most judicious, and is the only safe way in which contract or task-work can be effectually proved or tested. It will be seen hereafter, also, to have been adopted by Mr. Worsley in examining the survey as a whole, before the work was finally received by the State. The separate survey and protraction of common boundaries, enjoined by the sixth section, was a palpable and simple check, one indeed at which surveyors are very apt to repine, but which it is never safe to abandon for any clamour for saving of time. The precautions of the seventh section are all efficient and good. The eighth section provides that the meresmen should, as far as possible, be those employed by the Civil Survey Commissioners. If it had been practicable, this should have been imperative, and they should have been appointed on the part of the Commissioners, as before adverted to. It is easy, however, to see that other difficulties might have arisen from that course, and this instruction probably meets the antagonist evils as well as was practicable. Generally, in regard to all, nay, to each and every of them, it is not beside the subject to say that there is not one of these precautions which was not found indispensable on the similar work of the Ordnance Survey, and it is even more remarkable that clear directions on the same points were laid down also in the similar instructions prepared by the able director of that work. Colonel, now General Colby, who, it is needless to say, had never seen or heard of the archives and documents we are now consulting and printing. Many of the instructions of Dr. Petty and Colonel Colby might be printed in parallel columns, so remarkably have the same circumstances produced the same results, from minds very similar in some respects to each other.

The paragraph at the bottom of the fifty-second, and top of the fifty-third page, refers to a separate survey of the adventurers' lands, thus alluded to in the "Reflections." "Moreover, never was better security taken by oaths and bonds, nor ever more prudential cautions used in any former survey, insomuch that nothing could be added even by (more nice than wise),