This defect in our organization has been the cause of serious inconvenience, and the consequent waste of public property. The expense of hiring civil agents for this purpose has more than trebled the cost of supporting a suitable number of non-commissioned guards to maintain the good order and efficiency of our forts, in the absence of engineer officers, and to preserve and keep in repair the military implements and stores connected with this department of the army. It has already been shown that we have fifty-eight of these guards for the artillery service, and it really seems somewhat singular that the engineers, with a much greater amount of public property in their charge, are allowed no assistants of this kind. III. _Engineer artificers_ are a class of men employed in the practical operations of constructing forts and other military defences, and in making and repairing all the implements used by the engineer troops in the operations of sapping and mining, in crossing rivers, in constructing field-defences, and in the attack and defence of fieldworks. As very few new fortifications are now required in France, the services of engineer artificers are less necessary and important than in our service, where large sums of money are annually expended upon military defences, There are, however, in the French army a corps of engineer artificers, consisting of eight officers and a cadre of fifty-four non-commissioned officers, with a variable number of privates, organized into two companies. _But in our army we have no regular engineer artificers!_ In our artillery service we have three hundred and thirty enlisted artillery artificers. If these are useful and necessary to the artillery service, which no one doubts, for still stronger reasons would it be advantageous to the public service to employ at least an equal number of enlisted engineer artificers on our fortifications; for the annual expenditure of public money is here much greater than in the corresponding branch of the artillery service. IV. _Engineer troops_ are divided into three classes--1st, _sappers and pioneers_; 2d, _miners_; and 3d, _pontoniers_.