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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. LANDMARKS. STAKES AND STONES. Certain landmarks may be specifically mentioned in a description. These may perhaps be called special landmarks and must be identified as far as possible from the characteristics named in that description. But beside these there are a large number of general marks not mentioned perhaps in the deed, but which are nevertheless of the greatest possible value. Yet there can be no hard and fast classification of these, because they vary greatly with locality. On Long Island, where the most of my own work lies, there are certain marks which are of the highest importance, yet their use is confined largely, if not entirely, to Long Island. From the great abundance of yellow locust and the great capacity of its wood for resisting decay, it is used almost exclusively for surveyors\' stakes in this section. \" To a locust stake \" is the typical phrasing of a Long Island description. It is preeminently the surveyor\'s mark for the locality, yet it is manifestly not a landmark for regions where the yellow locust does not grow. For the reason that stones of glacial origin are plentiful in the hills of the North Shore and scarce on the plains of the center and the South Shore the interpretation of the meaning of stonesas indicating old boundaries differs considerably in localities actually separated by perhaps only a dozen miles. The nature of landmarks or, more accurately speaking, of the marks employed to indicate a boundary, may therefore vary greatly with the locality, and it is imperative that the surveyor should at once familiarize himself with the usages which prevail in the section where he is working. There are, however, certain kinds of landmarks which are widespread in their general use, though local custom may modify even these some...