66 official measurements of new land ye been attended to during the and 78 reports as to boundary esshave been made to the various Corsulates, by ig of the Society was i, Yuen Ming Yuen Road on Tuesday evening, the President, Mr. A. P. Wood in the chair. Before commencing the proceedings the President alluded to the death of Mr. John Chambers, one of the original members of the Society. A paper on the "Pedograph" by Mr. T. Ferguson, the inventor, was then read by the Honorary Secretary Mr. C. H. Godire; When on & previous occasion the author read before the Society a paper on the Hodograph, an instrument designed for automatically recording the courses of waterways traversed, one of the questions asked during the ensuing discussion was whether the said instrument could not. be adapted for use on land. To this the writer replied that the question had already been under consideration and that he hoped at some future date to be able to offer a complete expose of the new strument in the shape of a separate paper. It was this instrument, dubbed with the hybj but easily understood name of dograph,"—which formed the subject of the paper.
'The author said that the principle on which the instrument worked was that of the well-known pedometer, the actuating power being derived from' the pulsations of a poised hammer, brought about by the regular vertical jolts without which it is hardly possible for a human being to walk. Everything was therefore based on pacing, There had always been among surveying men a great diversity of opinion regarding the use and reliability of pain; in surveying. Much of this difference, o course, arose from the variety of ways in which the paces were counted and reduced to Jand measure, the various purposes for which and conditions under which the pacing has been applied, and the varying amount of judgment and care exercised in applying the results. In the Pedograph the indication depended also directly upon the number of paces, but by making the hammer much heavier than that of the pedometer, and placing it between nonclastic stops, the chances of false rebounds were reduced to minimum, Without entering further into this question, it might be assumed that under all but exceptionally bad conditions, pacing was a recognised factor in surveying, to which might be added the tenet that in in Kinds of surveys, ie, where a single-handed observer could only afford to pass once over a route, it was the onl practicable mode of gauging distances. Tt has generally assumed that in regular pacing, results might be relied upon within 2 or 3%. But in the actual work in which the Pedograph was likely to be used, it would rarely be necessary to rely
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.