It was not until long after the organization of the Ordnance Survey that it became a cadastral survey. Its organization at first was distinctly for military purposes, and the extension of its operations to cover all national needs only attained after years of discussion, and struggle for existence. The credit of originating and carrying into execution the first tangible project for a systematic topographical survey of part of the kingdom is divided between two engineer officers, both at the time holding distinguished positions on the staff of the British army. The idea would seem to have followed close upon the sanguinary termination at Culloden of the "forty-five" rebellion, by which the fate of the house of Stuart was decided, in the reign of George the Second. It was doubtless the outcome of that unhappy rising for it contemplated a general map of the Scottish highlands, precisely those parts of the country in which the heart and soul of the insurrectionary movement had all along centered. The difficulties of moving troops through these wild mountain districts, and without any clear knowledge of the passes connecting the glens and fastnesses, or of the correct distances intervening, would have been enormously lessened by the possession of good maps. The survey of this wild and inaccessible region was undertaken in 1747 by Lieutenant-General Watson, an engineer, ably assisted by William Roy, who afterwards played a distinguished part in the earlier geodetic work of the Ordnance Survey. The map, at first intended to be confined to the Highlands only, was at last extended to the Lowlands and thus made general in what related to the mainland of Scotland, the islands (except some lesser ones near the coast), not having been surveyed. It is spoken of by Lieutenant-Colonel White, in his excellent book on the Ordnance Survey, as a "piece of work which appears to have been excellently carried out as far as it went, qualified by the remark of Roy that owing to the comparative inferiority of the instruments used and the inadequacy of the annual grants provided for the survey it is rather to be considered as a magnificent military sketch than a very accurate map of the country." The survey of Scotland was interrupted by the breaking out in 1755 of another of England's intermittent wars with France, that which gained her Canada, and the work was never completed. "On the conclusion of the peace of 1763," writes General Roy, "it came for the first time under the consideration of government to make a general survey of the whole island at the public cost." But, for reasons not assigned, the twelve years' interval of peace before the outbreak in 1775 of the American War of Independence was allowed to pass away without anything being done. There the matter remained in abeyance until, after renewed hostilities with France and Spain, peace was negotiated in 1783.