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"It was," he writes, "while living at Barton that I obtained my first information that there was such a science as geology.... My brother, like most land-surveyors, was something of a geologist, and he showed me the fossil oysters of the genus Gryphæa and the Belemnites ... and several other fossils which were abundant in the chalk and gravel around Barton.... It was here, too, that during my solitary rambles I first began to feel the influence of nature and to wish to know more of the various flowers, shrubs and trees I daily met with, but of which for the most part I did not even know the English names.
It was Numa who placed property under the protection of Jupiter; who, in imitation of the Etrurians, wished to make priests of the land-surveyors; who invented a liturgy for cadastral operations, and ceremonies of consecration for the marking of boundaries, who, in short, made a religion of property.
In pursuance of my plan I introduced myself to the land-surveyors in Bamberg, and at once received employment from one of them. He had had considerable surveys in hand, and was still engaged upon them. As I showed some proficiency in mapping, he entrusted me with the preparation of the necessary maps which accompanied the surveys.
Local accidents, such as the convenience of the site at Carthage, led to occasional adoption of the narrower oblong. The Roman land-surveyors, it is true, distinguished the square and the oblong in a very definite way. The square, they alleged, was proper to the Italian land or to such provincial soil as enjoyed the privilege of being taxed or freed from taxation on the Italian scale.
A system of town-planning that is so distinctive and so widely used might reasonably have created a series of building-laws sanctioning or modifying it. This did not occur. Neither the lawyers nor even the land-surveyors, the so-called Gromatici, tell us of any legal rules relative to town-planning as distinct from surveying in general.
At the accession of King George he was made Poet-Laureate I am afraid, by the ejection of poor Nahum Tate, who died in the Mint, where he was forced to seek shelter by extreme poverty. He was made likewise one of the land-surveyors of the customs of the Port of London.
This kept me employed for some time on work sufficiently remunerative for my needs. Of course the question in hand with the new Government was the appointment of land-surveyors, and those who were resident in the town were invited to send in maps of Bamberg as specimens of their work. Through the instruction I had enjoyed in my youth I was not unacquainted with such work.
But suppose there are beings on Mars sufficiently advanced in scientific invention to be able to watch in detail the operations of this survey on earth. Suppose that they construe the operations of the English land-surveyors in reference to the space natural to a being on Mars, namely a Martio-centric space in which that planet is fixed. The earth is moving relatively to Mars and is rotating.
With this at first they had been highly delighted, but some ten miles from the fort they had been joined by an Indian who declared he had seen such things in Carolina, doubtless among land-surveyors, and who stigmatized it as a "land-stealer," forthwith crushing it with his tomahawk.
Is this an addition to the former programme of the ceremony, in mockery of theorists in general, for whom the ordinary peasant has the most sovereign contempt, or in detestation of land-surveyors, who control the register of lands and assess the taxes, or of the employees of the Department of Roads and Bridges, who convert common lands into highways and cause the suppression of time-worn abuses dear to the peasant heart?
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