the human race on earth.” Let us honour the builders with a simple moment’s consideration. Engineer Colonel O. M. Poe, in his report to General Sherman, said: “An army of workmen were employed, 25,000 men and 6,000 teams, and the route presented a busy scene. The woods rang with the strokes of the axe, and the quarries with the click of steel; the streams were bordered with lumbermen’s camps and choked with floating logs, and materials, supplies, and equipment for the Central Pacific were scattered from New York _via_ Cape Horn and San Francisco to the end of the track advancing eastward.” The base of supplies of the Central Pacific from the Eastern Rolling Mills, by the way of Cape Horn to the track layers, was equal to the circuit of the globe on the parallel of the road. This distance was so great as to keep materials to the value of millions of dollars, and sufficient for nearly a year’s construction, constantly in transit. In cutting the Sierras, miles of snow and rock were tunneled; snow slides and avalanches destroyed many lives and large amounts of property. To hasten the work of piercing the Sierras, three locomotives, forty cars, rails, and track material for forty miles of railroad were hauled on sleds by oxen and horses over the summits of that Alpine range and down into the cañon of the Truckee River. This over a pass in which the annual average snowfall was forty feet and the depth of hard settled snow in midwinter was eighteen feet on the level. Who at this distance appreciates the stupendous work of these Titans? From the Truckee to the Bear River in Utah, the inhabitants did not average one to each ten miles. With the exception of a few cords of stunted pine and juniper, all the fuel had to be hauled from the Sierras. For over five hundred miles there was not a tree that would make a board or tie. Fortunes were expended in boring for water and in laying pipes, in some instances over eight miles in length, to convey water to the line of the road. Upon this desert stretch, as far as from Boston to Buffalo, there was nothing that entered into the superstructure of a railroad, not even good stone, and water for men and animals was hauled at times for forty miles. The cost of supplies was fabulous; oats and barley for the animals cost from $200 to $280 per ton, and hay $120. But, as with Grant at Vicksburg and at the Wilderness, the work went on, the road was completed, and it was California Pioneers who did it, and who made the road they built their monument, and “success” their epitaph. Senator Benton said his dream was “to see a train of cars thundering down the Eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, bearing in transit to Europe the teas, silks, and spices of the Orient.” His dream is practically realised, as there are seven trans-continental lines bearing this commerce to the Atlantic.