Our strange Ashanti War gave further evidence of the formation of a telegraph line through a wild country inhabited by a barbarous people. Lieutenant Jekyll, who had the management of this work, has given a lively account of the difficulties that beset him, and his mode of overcoming them. It was at first intended to fight the war with native levies and to lay down a railway; but Sir Garnet Wolseley, on landing to take the command, soon found that the natives were not sufficiently reliable, that the country was almost impracticable for a railway, that he must have English troops, and that an electric telegraph would be a highly useful aid. Lieutenant Jekyll, with a small staff, went inland and bought bamboo canes of the blacks, set them up as posts, and laid his wires from Cape Coast Castle to Coomassie at the rate of about two miles a day. A gang of fifty natives helped him. Of these worthies he says: 'They were not promising in appearance, and I was compelled to dispense with the services of those who were _less than four feet high_! (We italicise these words to shew what pigmies many of the West Africans are.) But they had with them an intelligent headman; and by dint of supervision, supplemented by a little flogging once now and then, turned out a tolerably useful body for light work, as niggers go.' The line was extended by degrees as far as Accrofumu, about a hundred miles from the coast. An amusing proof was afforded of the tendency of the natives to regard the telegraph as a kind of fetich, charm, or spell. The English one day saw bits of white cotton-thread suspended from tree to tree for several miles, as if to obtain thereby some of the mysterious benefits which the white man evidently expected from the wire. When the native helpers received small electric shocks occasionally, consequent on the testing or using of the line, they made sure that a charm was at work; and the lieutenant was half afraid his men would run away in terror. The climate was very trying to the English, who, lying ill with fever, got the natives to rouse them when any movements of the receiving apparatus were observed. Nevertheless, this telegraphic line rendered services much more than compensatory for the expense, difficulty, and anxiety of laying, maintaining, and using it. The truly wonderful and eventful Franco-German War of 1870-1 exhibited the value of electro-telegraphy with a completeness never equalled before or since. A foretaste had been given in the Austro-Prussian or 'Seven Weeks' War' of 1866; when four complete and distinct telegraphic organisations were adopted--one with Prince Frederick-William's fine army; one with that of Prince Charles; one at the king's headquarters; and one in reserve. Each could lay down wires as fast as the headquarters could advance. The speedy termination of the war averted the necessity of constructing field-telegraphs, such as those about to be described.