Abstract
WITH a view to reducing the number of colliery accidents, the law now requires that an accurate plan shall be kept of the workings of each mine. This has led to increased attention being devoted to the subject of mine surveying. Hitherto, it is true, mine surveying has not kept pace with the advances made in other branches of surveying. Great improvements have, nevertheless, been made during the last decade. Colliery managers are now submitted to a severe educational test before certificates are granted to them, and surveying classes are now held at most mining centres. For elementary students attending such classes, Mr. O'Donahue has written this concise little primer. Taking for granted that his readers have merely a knowledge of arithmetic, he has endeavoured to compress into his pages a complete course of instruction in surface surveying, mine surveying and levelling, together with the requisite preliminary information regarding mechanical drawing, geometry, mensuration and the determination of inaccessible heights and distances. With so comprehensive a scheme, and with so small and inexpensive a book, the instructions are necessarily brief and, for the most part, unaccompanied by theoretical explanations. It is to be feared, therefore, that an elementary student working with this book without guidance might be led to learn by heart details without having grasped principles. Used under the supervision of a capable teacher, however, it should prove useful as an aide-memoire to young students. The absence of an index is a serious drawback, whilst the superfluous section on the mensuration of solids could easily have been spared. Numerous typographical errors in the figures have escaped the author's notice. Thus in the first example, worked out on p. 34, there are three mistakes in one line, and in the next line the correct value of 15° is stated to be 1 in 3˙74, whilst in the table of incline measure, on p. 142, it is 1 in 3˙73. In that table itself there is often an uncertainty about the final figures; for example, the correct inclines for 3°, 4° and 5° are 1 in 19˙08, 14˙30 and and 11˙43 respectively, not 1 in 19˙09, 14˙29 and 11˙42, as stated. On p. 140 the reduced level given is 50˙3, but the measurement plotted in the drawing is 553. Again, the base line of the Trigonometrical Survey was measured in 1784, not 1874, as stated on p. 29. Trifling misprints of this kind, whilst perfectly obvious to the advanced student, are apt to prove stones of stumbling to the beginner.
Colliery Surveying: a Primer designed for the Use of Students and Colliery Manager Aspirants.
By T. A. O'Donahue. Pp. 163. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1896.)
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Colliery Surveying: a Primer designed for the Use of Students and Colliery Manager Aspirants. Nature 55, 438 (1897). https://doi.org/10.1038/055438a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/055438a0