The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's Handbook

"The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's Handbook" by H. Percy Boulnois is a guide for those working to improve towns and cities during the late 1800s. It explains what a Borough Surveyor in England was expected to do, covering important areas like keeping the town clean, building roads, and making sure public health rules were followed. The book starts by explaining how the job of town surveyor was created by law, showing just how many different tasks the surveyor was in charge of -- everything from making sure the city's waste was taken care of, to building and taking care of roads, and making sure people followed health guidelines. Boulnois points out that to do all these things properly, a surveyor needed to know a lot about civil engineering, setting the stage for the more detailed information to come in later sections.