THE SURVEY OF BUSH LAND.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4433, 4 June 1875, Page 3

THE SURVEY OF BUSH LAND.

TO TUB EDITOR OF THE NEW ZEALAND TIMES. Sir, —Perhaps you may consider that the interest and importance of the matter referred to in the following remarks, to owners and cleavers of bush lands, is sufficient to justify their insertion in your columns. , , . . , The method of measuring uneven land for bush falling practised in this district is an uncertain and misleading one. It is this: The piece of land on which bush has been felled is so arranged as to be bounded by certain straight lines, which are measured along the surface of the ground, ami the area is supposed to be obtained by considering the block as a piano rectilineal figure, of which the sides are of these measured lengths. The uncertain and misleading effect of this process is rendered apparent by comparing it with that employed by land surveyors. They, in defining the figure and area of a piece of land, disregard its inequalities, and are in consequence enabled to represent it as a plane figure with similar sides and angles to those of the ground ; whereas, if they used measurements for the sides along an uneven surface—as is done by bush-fallers — thereby allowing some side to be disproportionately lengthened, they could not, in representing the block as a plane figure, retain the same horizontal angles, but the figure must be somewhere distorted, and its area irregularly modified. Doubtless this custom of surface-measuring has arisen and become established through a very prevalent, though erroneous impression that any increase in the lengths of the sides of a plane figure increases ■ its area ; whereas, the fact is, that in certain cases it does directly the reverse. That this is the case will be manifest from a consideration of the following example:—Let the block, of which the area is required, be a triangle with sides by surveyor’s measurement of 100 chains^ 20 chains, and 110 chains; this triangle then contains a little more than 90fc acresand suppose the sides 100 chains and 20 chains, to lie respectively along a ridge and a spur leading down from it, or so that the bush measurement would exceed surveyors’ measurement by l-10th, making them respectively 110 chains and 22 chains, then the other side will run across the spurs and gullies leading down from the ridge, and will in consequence, by bush measurement, be disproportionately lengthened, say, by l-stb, becoming thereby 132 chains. We then find that the effect of thus lengthening a side disproportionately to thisextent has been to close up the triangle entirely, so that it now contains nothing at all. This result would be a very unacceptable one to the bush-faller, who is paid by the area obtained in this way ; and although the absurdity of this result would lead to its rejection in this case, still in any such a triangle the same Influence must be more or less at work, possibly in a not sufficiently marked degree to open the eyes of those interested, but still with a sufficiently unfair effect. In all cases, the effect of lengthening the longest side of a triangle which contains an angle not less than a right angle is to diminish the area. The process of obtaining an area for a piece of uneven land in this way, therefore, in the cases of such triangles, leads to results which are manifestly not such as are contemplated or desired by those using it, whilst in the cases of all other figures than triangles, the use of these bush measurements necessarily distorts the angles of the figure, and alone is insufficient to definitely determine any area at all.—l am, &c., E. E. Foster. Wellington, May 24.