5. The tamping of the holes should be of the heaviest and stickiest clay that can be obtained, and this tamping should extend the entire length of the hole above the powder. 6. Never thaw dynamite in front of the fire, or on a hot stone removed from a fire, or by piling sticks in a boiler or in an oven. By order of, RICHARD T. DANA, General Manager. In hauling earth, the principal elements of team expense are the time to haul and the standing still to load. This last item can be very materially reduced by the simple expedient of having on the work an extra wagon or two. A team can be changed from one wagon to another in about one and a─half minutes, and the same number of teams on a short haul will do easily 15 per cent more work by this trick. The same principle applies to the mixing of concrete involving extra wheelbarrows; and here it may be mentioned that the arrangement of the concrete platform is seldom economical. The men, if left to themselves, will usually not have sufficient runways, so that a man with a loaded wheelbarrow will be painfully struggling up a plank, while a man with an empty wheelbarrow is waiting for him to get out of the way. Much can be accomplished by having the men move in procession so that no man with a wheelbarrow will ever have to stand and wait for another man to get out of his way. Of course the ideal method of handling concrete into a mixer is to do it from bins with chutes; but the great majority of this class of work is not done in this manner. On contract work, the emergency charges for the moving of plant are usually considerably higher than they ought to be, owing to the fact that the work is done by men who are not especially skilful in this kind of work. The direction of these processes should be given to a man who is especially good at it; and the work should be provided with a good supply of gin poles, snatch blocks, tackle, etc.