Amos Eaton's Mental Struggles

Amos Eaton was a lawyer, surveyor, scientist, author, and teacher and one of the founders of the Rensselaer School, what is now known as the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He published books on surveying, mathematics, geology, chemistry, and botany. His first book, published in 1802, was a surveying manual with a great title: Art Without Science, or the Art of Surveying, Unshackled with the Terms and Science of Mathematics. 

From the US Geological Survey, via si.edu

His next book wouldn't be published until 1817, but there would be a steady stream of books from then on. His productivity as an author seems to have been set in motion by a period of incarceration at Greenwich Jail in New York City. He was imprisoned for about five years (1811-1815 or 1816) for allegedly forging documents in a land dispute that involved the powerful New York landlord Edward Livingston.  Eventually he was given an unconditional pardon by the governor and released. It was during his time in prison that he began his scientific studies (and encouraged the scientific studies of young John Torrey, the son of a prison official). After leaving prison he spent a year as a student at Yale and then began a career as an itinerant science instructor in New England and New York.

In 1824 he offered some advice to his son Amos B. Eaton, then a cadet at West Point, about critics ("pigmy foplings" and "ephemeral scribblers") and the hard life of the mind.

The Compleat Surveyor, revived

I'm currently in the reading room of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, looking into their amazing collection of printed materials related to early American surveying. Most of their published materials date to after 1800, which is when I want to wrap up my story. But as part of that effort to tell the story of the colonial surveyor, I need to get a better sense of how surveying, and surveyors, changed in the early republican period, too.

One example of a mid-19th century text in their collections is James Pedder's Farmers' Land-Measurer, or Pocket Companion, which went through a number of editions. The first edition appears to have been published in Philadelphia in 1842. The AAS holds editions from 1853 and 1854, which were published in New York.

What I like most is its cover, which you can also see in this online edition available on Archive.org (from the 1855/1856 edition).