The committee therefore without hesitation proposed the introduction of the Madras carriage, with exception to the wheels and elevating-screw, the Bengal wheels and the royal 3–pounder screw being considered better. The Military Board, on the suggestion of the commandant of artillery (Colonel Deare), recommended that the Madras Government should be requested to send round musters of their 6–pounders, and 5½-inch howitzer-carriages, and Lord Cornwallis approved of the plan. Colonel Deare was also requested to correspond with Colonel Giels (who had commanded the Madras Artillery in the campaign) on the subject of any defects which he might consider to exist in the carriages in question. This correspondence has not fallen in our way, and it seems doubtful whether the Madras carriage was at this time introduced. Up to 1801 no pattern seems to have been permanently fixed on, or else the Madras pattern had intermediately fallen into disrepute, for, as will be hereafter noticed, some modification of the Bengal pattern was at this time preferred. The Madras pattern alluded to is believed to have been a block trail—the trail divided in two pieces, with the cheeks on each cut out from the solid timber; the trail was very long and the limber had a projection with a limbering-hook at the end (Plate No. 2). The chief faults in this construction were the waste of timber in cutting out the trail and cheeks; the unnecessary length of the trail, which, although it rendered the recoil easier, yet made the draught heavier; and this was again increased by the projection in rear of the limber. Another, and a serious evil, arose from the lever with which the weight of the carriage acted on the cattle in draught, the axle of the limber being the fulcrum. This pattern, however, considerably modified, became the galloper or horse-artillery carriage in Bengal. It is, however, worthy of notice, how nearly the principle of this carriage corresponds with that of the royal pattern introduced twenty years later, and now the standard of all India; had the fantail been cut off, and the limbering-hook attached to the axle-bed, there would have been little difference; and it is strange that this was not done, for the objection had been seen and noticed in the siege-carriages, and a remedy adopted, not indeed by giving the hook to the axle-bed, but by lowering the limber-wheels and fixing a moveable pintle on the bolster.