Page:Petty 1851 The Down Survey.djvu/382

 arrived at. Dr. Petty probably intended to continue the narrative in more detail in regard to his arrangements for the distribution of lands, as intimated in the fourteenth chapter, but it is not known that he ever did so. His Political Anatomy of Ireland, and other works, however, contain the results of the thought and calculations to which he was led by these duties, and his public life did not terminate with the Commonwealth. Immediately after the Restoration his knowledge and ability were again useful, and he was one of the commissioners for carrying out the instructions of the Act of Settlement. By the 101st clause of that Act his property was confirmed to him, as held on the 7th of May, 1659. By several clauses the survey was recognised as the authentic document of reference for the purpose of settlement and claims, the Act not allowing dissatisfied parties to call for other surveys, unless errors of more than one-tenth were discovered in it.

In the Act of Explanation, again, by the 55th clause, his titles were confirmed; and his claim to the unpaid penny an acre on certain adventurers' lands, was recognised by the 100th clause, with powers for its enforcement, "for his better encouragement to finish the maps and description of this Kingdom."

His petitions to the King in 1661, 1664, and 1666, on these points, as well as for remuneration for his former services as a commissioner of distribution, are among the valuable papers in the charge of Sir William Betham, in the Record Tower of Dublin Castle. Of the description of Ireland, it is to be presumed the various topographical memoirs which he collected from time to time were to form parts; and the survey gave him immense facilities for collecting exact information. The effort to extend the maps to a real survey, by this collection and publication of memoirs in connexion with it, had also its analogy in the Ordnance Survey, in which also the effort failed. Governments, like men, are apt to measure the value of a thing by its cost, instead of its results, by what produces it, instead of by what it will produce,—"will bring" (less wise in that respect than Sir Hudibras!) Many may dissent from the views taken in the Political Anatomy, but none will deny of what value it would be to us, if the local state and circumstances of every district at that time, had been placed on record. Dr. Petty saw clearly that a map alone is not a survey, though it is the indispensable basis of such a work, O'Flaherty's Description of West Connaught, recently edited for our Society by our learned colleague, Mr. Hardiman, has preserved for posterity the effort of Dr. Petty in this direction; while the Memoir of Templemore, and the numerous historical papers collected and preserved in the Office of the Ordnance Survey, will remain to show that similar efforts were made in connexion with the more modern work; and the Geology of Londonderry, with the Museum of Natural History, evince the extension of the subject to those branches of science which at the date of the former survey were unknown or in their infancy.

In 1660, while the Long Parliament was still sitting, we find Dr. Petty's name occur, not answering malicious charges in that assembly, but in Pepys' Diary, on the evening of the 10th March, "at the coffee-house with a great confluence of gentlemen, where admirable discourse till nine at night." Here is probably a germ of the Royal Society, of which the Doctor was an early and distinguished member. The notice stands, with the usual grotesqueness of Pepys' motley narrative, in the midst of political turmoil.