Excerpt from Treatise on the Art of Measuring, Containing All That Is Useful in Bonnycastle, Hutton, Hawney, Ingram, and Several Other Modern Works on Mensuration, To Which Are Added Trigonometry, With Its Application to Heights and Distances, Surveying, Gauging, 1831

The art of Measuring, like all other useful inventions, appears to have been the offspring of want and necessity, and to have had its origin in those remote ages of antiquity, which are far beyond the reach of credible and authentic history. Egypt, the fruitful mother of almost all the liberal sciences, is imagined to have given birth, among the rest, to Geometry or Mensuration, it being to the inundations of the Nile that we are said to be indebted for this interesting and important branch of human knowledge.

After the overflowings of the river had deluged the country, and all artificial boundaries and land-marks were destroyed, there could have been no other method of ascertaining individual property, than by a previous knowledge of its figures and dimensions. From this circumstance, it appears highly probable, that Geometry was first known and cultivated by the Egyptians, as being the only science which could administer to their wants, and furnish them with the assistance they required. The name itself properly signifies the art of measuring the earth, which serves still further to confirm this opinion, especially, as it is well known that many of the ancient mathematicians applied their geometrical knowledge only to that purpose, and that even the Elements of Euclid, as they now stand, are only the theory from which we obtain the rules and precepts of our present more mechanical process.

But to trace the sciences to their first rude beginnings, is a matter only of learned curiosity, which could afford but little gratification to readers in general. It is of much more consequence to the rising generation to be informed that, in their present improved state, they are of the greatest utility and importance. And in this respect, the art I have undertaken to elucidate is inferior to none, Arithmetic only excepted. Its use in most of the different branches of the Mathematics is so general and extensive that it may justly be considered as the mother and mistress of all the rest, being the source from which their various properties and principles were at first chiefly derived.

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