Frank de Yeaux Carpenter

“ During the last session of Congress an unsuccessful attempt was made to do away with the inferior titles of assistant surgeon and passed-assistant surgeon in the navy, and, in plain English, to call a surgeon a surgeon, as we call a spade a spade. The medical service of the army descends not only to the assistant surgeon, but also to the lower estate of acting assistant surgeon. ”

“ A first-class clerk on the civil list is a novice, receiving twelve hundred dollars a year; he becomes a fourth-class clerk, at eighteen hundred a year, only after three promotions. A lieutenant in the army is far beneath the major, but a lieutenant-general is above the major-general. Nor do the grades of lieutenant and captain in the army by any means correspond in importance with similar titles in the navy. Who can tell which is the higher officer of the navy, the chief-engineer or the engineer-in-chief? ”

“ The War Department is especially ungenerous in its designation of the civilians who are engaged upon its engineering work. Perhaps in order to keep this numerous class in the background, as far from the public appreciation as possible, and thus to increase the prominence of the engineer officers, it is ordained that, with one or two exceptions, no civilian shall be known other than as an assistant in some shape or other. ”

“ In fact, the draughtsman who adheres too closely and conscientiously to Lehmann's or any other conventional diapason of shades is likely to construct a map whose geographical features are stiff, unnatural, and almost mechanical in their geometrical regularity, just as the writer who checks up every sentence by his text-books of grammar and rhetoric produces an essay with none but negative merits to recommend it. ”

“ In private life this is so, and when a man is called an oculist, a photographer, or a grocer, we immediately know his place and importance as a member of society. When a barber dubs himself a "tonsorial artist," and when the Government, with its red tape, assembles lawyer, physician, and statistician under the omnium gatherum title of "clerk," it is an offense against good English language. Since the true worker is always an enthusiast in his profession, and resents being classified under any other head, it is equally an injury to himself. ”

“ EVERY new scientific book is duly noticed, and every meritorious painting or other work of art receives its critical mention, but we have yet to see, in this country, any review of that combination of science and art—a geographical map. ”

“ As the officers of the army, by whom these things are regulated, are the greatest of sticklers in regard to their own rank, and there is no breach of military etiquette more serious than the mutilation of a title or the omission of a brevet, we would naturally expect from them greater consideration in their intercourse with civilians; and, if a man is a civil engineer by virtue of diploma and experience, he should be allowed the simple justice of remaining such. ”

“ When a man is appointed a civil engineer in the navy there are a few of that profession employed at the several navy-yards throughout the country—he is entered upon the register under that name, he wears the imprint of his title upon his uniform, and, among his friends or in the witness-box, he has no difficulty in explaining his occupation. ”

“ In one respect this has an advantage over the maps of the thickly settled European countries, upon which the utilitarian features of roads, villages, and other works of man are so numerous as to obscure the natural attractions of the land, and to give it the uninteresting appearance of a city plot; for too many right angles detract from the beauty of a map as well as from the charm of a landscape. ”

“ It was left to the Coast Survey to invent the ingeniously menial designation of "acting sub-assistant," and it is difficult to see how any man, loaded down with the ignominy of such a name, could ever do good work or rise to better things. Whatever may be the duties of any participant in the excellent work of that organization, he can not, in good English, be less than an assistant, and yet only officers of the highest attainable grade are entitled to the latter distinction. ”

“ The prestige of the Engineer Corps, upheld by the good work of the civil engineers, would have carried them through any crisis, if the latter class had seriously cared to continue the partnership longer, and if the scientific world had approved of so unequal a distribution of rewards as prevailed there. ”

“ A man's title is in some sense the measure of the respect which the world gives him, and justice to himself and a due regard for the world's convenience demand that it should be expressed in words that will plainly describe his occupation. ”

“ There is certainly nowhere else in our country an area of equal extent so diversified and broken. Extending from latitude 38° 45' to 39° 32', and from longitude 119° 33' to 120° 22', it reaches from the desert inland basin of Nevada to the timbered and grassy mountain-spurs—embraced by the multitudinous forks of the American River—with which the Sierra Nevada range descends into the Sacramento Valley of California. ”

“ The civil engineers of America are not a haughty class, but still they do not wish to pass into official history in such a shape as that,
Words are principally useful for the conveyance of ideas, and when they convey no idea, or, at best, an erroneous one, they fail of their mission. ”

“ Still below the assistants and sub-assistants come the aids, young officers whose inferiority of position is mollified by the possession of a title synonymous in meaning with that of their superiors, and therefore equally respectable in the popular comprehension. ”

“ It is a subject of common remark among travelers that nowhere else have they found a spot at once so easily reached and containing so great a variety of the interesting, the beautiful, and the grand, as here adjacent to Lake Tahoe, and this map will accomplish a not unimportant mission if it serves to call attention to a region too often overlooked. Leaving the Pacific Railway at Truckee or Reno, a circuit of one hundred miles will include not only this district, but the silver-mines of Virginia City and the mineral waters of Steamboat Springs as well. ”

“ The methods in question combine the rapid reconnaissance, the mountain sketch, and the barometrical height upon a precise geodetic basis, incorporating all reliable information attainable from other sources, especially the land-surveys, which give certain points in roads and streams, and the perimeters of valleys and areas of water. ”