(From the _Daily News_, October 17, 1868.)
[14] The reader need hardly be reminded of the complete fulfilment of this anticipation, during the war between France and Germany.
At the close of the war with Tippoo Sahib, Major Lambton planned the triangulation of the country lying between Madras and the Malabar coast, a district which had been roughly surveyed, during the progress of the war, by Colonel Mackenzie. The Duke of Wellington gave his approval to the project, and his brother, the Governor-General of India, and Lord Clive (son of the great Clive), Governor of Madras, used their influence to aid Major Lambton in carrying out his design. The only astronomical instrument made use of by the first survey party was one of Ramsden’s zenith-sectors, which Lord Macartney had placed in the hands of Dinwiddie, the astronomer, for sale. A steel chain, which had been sent with Lord Macartney’s embassy to the Emperor of China and refused, was the only apparatus available for measuring.
Thus began the great Trigonometrical Survey of India, a work whose importance it is hardly possible to over-estimate. Conducted successively by Colonel Lambton, Sir George Everest, Sir Andrew Waugh, and Lieut.-Col. Walker (the present superintendent), the trigonometrical survey has been prosecuted with a skill and accuracy which renders it fairly comparable with the best work of European surveyors. But to complete in this style the survey of the whole of India would be the work of several centuries. The trigonometrical survey of Great Britain and Ireland has been already more than a century in progress, and is still unfinished. It can, therefore, be imagined that the survey of India—nearly ten times the size of the British Isles, and presenting difficulties a hundredfold greater than those which the surveyor in England has to encounter—is not a work which can be quickly completed.
But the growing demands of the public service have rendered it imperatively necessary that India should be rapidly and completely surveyed. This necessity led to the commencement of the Topographical Survey of India, a work which has been pushed forward at a surprising rate during the past few years. My readers may form some idea of the energy with which the survey is in progress, from the fact that Colonel Thuillier’s Report for the season 1866-67 announces the charting of an area half as large as Scotland, and the preparatory triangulation of an additional area nearly half as large as England.