are made for the encouragement of native arts and manufactures when our University is extending the sphere of its usefulness, by having recently established a professorship of Engineering when a new College of Civil Engineering, Agriculture, and Mining, calculated to confer national benefit, by training up a new class of men, to explore the hidden treasures of our island, rich in soil, mines, and minerals, peculiar in its geological formation, and favourably situated as regards commercial intercourse with the other countries-when the formation of railroads through the kingdom is engrossing the attention of the legislature; a measure devoutly to be desired, as being eminently calculated to improve the condition of the nation generally, by giving employment, facilitating internal intercourse, and by the agency of steam, which annihilates time and space, drawing the most remote agricultural districts to the outskirts of the market-when extensive improvements are in progress on the river Shannon and elsewhere, by which inland navigation will be extended through the greatest length of the kingdom, from one extremity to the other, and vast quantities of land rescued from the deep-when an English company is actually engaged in the reclamation of bog and other waste lands; a speculation that will amply remunerate the capitalist for his outlay-when the mining companies of Ireland are prospering beyond their most sanguine expectations and when extensive surveys are being made in so many countries possessed by England-at such a period, a work bearing upon all these points, cannot fail to excite a degree of interest commensurate with the importance of the subjects of which it treats, and with the amount of information it contains. In presenting the work to the public, the author hopes that, though its prescribed limits necessarily precludes the entering, as he could have wished, fully into the inexhaustible branches of the science, it will be found to contain all that is useful in the different subjects of which it treats, simplified and arranged in such a manner as to afford much assistance not only to the learner, but to those practical engineers, also, whose practice has been confined but to few branches of the profession. To save the expense of purchasing a separate work on Trigonometry, and to render the following course as complete as the limits of the work would admit-a treatise on Plane Trigonometry is prefixed, containing such practical rules and examples as are of most frequent occurrence in the practice of engineering and surveying. This part of the work is succeeded by a survey by the chain. only, as practised on the parish survey of England, communicated by Mr. George Gregory, C.E., Professor of Field Engineering in the College for Civil Engineering, Mining, and Agriculture in Ireland, who was engaged in that service. After which is introduced, the method of surveying estates trigonometrically, as illustrated in a survey of Her Majesty's Phoenix Park, in the year 1837, by the author's son, under his own immediate superintendence. The application of this method is extended to the surveying of extensive countries, as practised on the national surveys of England, Ireland, and France. Maritime and Subterraneous Surveying occupies a small portion of the work; and though the author discourages the use of the common circumferentor, as a surveying instrument, yet as it is still in such general use among surveyors, he has deemed it right to show how to perform a survey by it. Ample instructions are given for plotting a survey and calculating its contents, by different methods; also for copying, enlarging, and diminishing maps, with the description and use of the various instruments employed by surveyors, and the most approved method of adjusting them. The First Volume concludes with a few questions, introduced with a view to exercise the pupil in the preceding part of the work. The Second Volume commences with a treatise on levelling; after which is introduced the method of making and repairing turnpike roads, on the most improved principles; together with the construction of railroads, canals, harbours, tunnels, aqueducts, viaducts, &c., and a description of the atmospheric railway; concluding with the method of improving lakes, bogs, marshes, rivers, &c. by drainage, embankment, and cultivation. Interspersed through the work, especially the Second Volume, will be found a great variety of subjects connected with engineering-such as water-works, animal power, &c. &c.; also a variety of tables and formulas, useful to the practical surveyor and engineer; with the method of adjusting and using all the instruments required in the profession of engineering. Such is a slight sketch of the contents of a work, which its author confidently hopes will prove an acceptable and useful companion to the young engineer; while he trusts that the more advanced practitioner may also find it a compendious and easy book of reference; and that both will find in it a great deal of indispensable information, conveyed in a method such as to obviate the necessity of having recourse to other and expensive works upon practical science. CONTENTS. Page To find the log. of any number, consisting of three places of figures To find the log. of any number, consisting of four places of figures To find the number answering to any log. of four figures To extract the square root by logarithms To find the natural sine or cosine of an arc; also the log. sine, co- sine, &c. of an arc to a second To find the degrees and minutes, or degrees, minutes, and seconds, |