Works, with a Memoir of the Author, Volume 4

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: REVIEW MUDGE'S ACCOUNT OF THE TRIGONOMETRICAL SURVEY OF ENGLAND. REVIEW OF THE TRIGONOMETRICAL SURVEY. 1 He work here announced is composed of papers read at different periods in the Royal Society of London, since the commencement of the Trigonometrical Survey in 1784, down to the present time. As the interest excited by that survey created an unusual demand for the volumes of the Philosophical Transactions in which the accounts of it were contained, the publisher of this work thought he would do a thing useful to science, and acceptable to the public, by collecting all these accounts into one. In this he has had the assistance of the Royal Society, and has been furnished with the plates already engraved for the Transactions; an indulgence of which he has made a very fair use, by selling the book at a lower price than the elegance of the work and the number of the plates might have entitled him to demand. From the Edinburgh Review, Vol. V. (1805.)?Ed. The first volume of the Trigonometrical Survey was published in 1799; and it is only the second part of the second volume which, by its date, falls immediately under our notice; but we trust that the importance of a great national undertaking will justify the retrospect which we are about to take of the whole. The idea of a Geometrical Survey, to be undertaken by Government, and executed at the public expence, first occurred on the suppression of the Rebellion in 1745, at the suggestion of the late Lieutenant-General Watson, at that time Deputy Quarter-master-general in North Britain. It fell to the late General Roy, who was then Assistant Quarter-master, to have a great share in the execution of this work; and the survey, which was at first meant to be confined to the Highlands, was extended to the ...