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Updated: June 7, 2025
"The very term mensuration sounds engineer-like," I find him writing; and in truth what the engineer most properly deals with is that which can be measured, weighed, and numbered.
Taylor, who was librarian at Cambridge, about the year 1732, used to relate of himself that one day throwing books in heaps for the purpose of classing and arranging them, he put one among works on Mensuration, because his eye caught the word height in the title-page; and another which had the word salt conspicuous, he threw among books on Chemistry or Cookery.
Pleasures are evils because they end in pain, and pains are goods because they end in pleasures. Thus pleasure is seen to be the only good; and the only evil is the preference of the lesser pleasure to the greater. But then comes in the illusion of distance. Some art of mensuration is required in order to show us pleasures and pains in their true proportion.
Railway-making is regulated from beginning to end by geometry: alike in the preparation of plans and sections; in staking out the line; in the mensuration of cuttings and embankments; in the designing and building of bridges, culverts, viaducts, tunnels, stations.
In those hundred and four hours a year hours which came after a tiring day's work his brain was fed upon "mensuration" and "the science of horticulture," the former on the chance that some day he might want to measure a wall for paper-hanging or do some other job of the sort, and the latter in case fate should have marked him out for a nursery-gardener, when it would be handy to know that germinating seeds begin by pushing down a root and pushing up a leaf or two.
A natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his mathematical knowledge, and his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains, and the air-line distance of his favorite summits, this, and his intimate knowledge of the territory about Concord, made him drift into the profession of land-surveyor.
'This laudable regulation, we are told in the Ain, 'removed the rust of uncertainty from the minds of collectors, and relieved the subject from a variety of oppressions, whilst the income became larger, and the State flourished. Akbar likewise caused to be adopted improved instruments of mensuration, and with these he made a new settlement of the lands capable of cultivation within the empire.
He has determined precisely the angle required, and he found, by the most exact mensuration the subject would admit, that it is the very angle in which the three planes at the bottom of the cell of a honey comb do actually meet."
Let us assume the mean distance of 60 diameters in the syzygies; and suppose one revolution of the moon, in respect to the fixed stars, to be completed in 27d. 7h. 43', as astronomers have determined; and the circumference of the earth to amount to 123,249,600 Paris feet, as the French have found by mensuration.
But the most profitable labour of these years was that which produced his first important book, The Practice of Arithmetic and Simple Mensuration, which was published in 1539, a venture which brought to the author a reward of ten crowns. It was a well-planned and well-arranged manual, giving proof of the wide erudition and sense of proportion possessed by the author.
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