SURVEYOR is a person who professes skill in measuring and valuing land and building work. Surveyors of standing are now associated in a society called the Surveyors' Institute. They either practise their profession to the exclusion of any other occupation, or in connection with that of an architect on the one hand or of an auctioneer and valuer on the other. The profes sional knowledge of an architect should comprise that of a surveyor, even though in fact he may confine his attention more particularly to the practice of architecture. And so an auctioneer and valuer, in order to successfully and usefully conduct a practice concerned with real property, should be a practical qualified surveyor. A surveyor who makes a speciality of taking out the quantities of clans, drawings, and specifications prepared by architects is known as a " quantity surveyor." There is no law specially applicable to surveyors, unless perhaps it is that the law does not hold that they warrant the correctness of their quantities or of the calculations connected therewith. And this is so even though it is the duty of a surveyor, generally speaking, to do his work accurately. But if he fails to use ordinary professional care and skill, and his work is in consequence incorrect, he is responsible to the person who has employed him for any loss resulting from such neglect. In
the absence of fraud he is not responsible to persons to whom he stands in no contractual relationship. Thus if a proposing mortgagee employs a surveyor to advise him as to the sufficiency as a security of the property intended to be mortgaged, and subsequently becomes mortgagee upon the advice of the surveyor, the latter, if he has acted negligently, will be liable to the mortgagee in case it should turn out that the property was incorrectly valued and the mortgagee had suffered daniage in consequence. But if a mortgagee of property just built, or in the course of building, makes his advances upon the strength of certificates given to the builder by a surveyor who was not appointed by the mortgagee, then (Le Lievre and Dennes v. Gould) if the mortgagee suffers damage in consequence of the surveyor's certificates containing (negligently, but without fraud) untrue statements as to the progress of the buildings, the mortgagee ca,nnot maintain an action against the surveyor. See ARCHITECT ; BUILDER.