The work certainly is one of no pretension, and on this score may be regarded as having cost but little toil in its preparation; but I may observe, that from the absence of many particular records, the unaccountable neglect in furnishing others, and the striking imperfections in many of the remaining papers, arising from complexity, vagueness, obliteration, or decay, more than ordinary difficulty, research, and trouble were experienced, in gathering the materials essential to give anything like a reasonable delineation of the events narrated in the Memoir. Paucity of detail in numbers, want of description with reference to particular occurrences, and gaps in many years from the loss of muster-rolls and official documents, run through a period of nearly half a century, from 1772 to 1815: and strange as it may appear, even the casualties in action so carefully reported in other corps, have, from some inexplicable cause, either been omitted altogether in the war despatches or given inaccurately. In later years, however, the connexion between the officers of the Royal Engineers and the soldiers of the Royal Sappers and Miners has been so fully established, that attention to these important minutiæ forms a decided feature in the improved command of the corps. In employments of a purely civil character in which the Royal Sappers and Miners have shared, care has been taken to explain, as fully as the records and collateral evidence would admit, the nature of its duties; and, likewise, to multiply authorities to prove the estimation in which it was held for its services and conduct. This has been mainly done, to offer a practical reply to an association, incorporated within the last twelve years, which, in the course of a futile agitation, endeavoured by injurious statements to lessen the corps in public esteem. All mention of the Royal Engineers in this memoir has been studiously suppressed, except when such was unavoidable to give identity to the different duties and services of the Royal Sappers and Miners, and also, when their direct and particular connexion with the corps in certain situations, rendered allusion to them justifiable. This course was suggested to me by an officer of high rank, for the obvious reason that, as the Royal Engineers is a body entirely distinct from the Sappers and Miners, and possesses its own annals, any reference to, or particularization of, its services in a work professedly confined to the corps, would not only be extraneous, but tend to lessen its value, and weaken its interest with those for whose information it was especially written.