to its strength. About 1801, horses were first used for the draught of guns in India. Experimental horse artillery was formed, and two galloper-guns were attached to each cavalry regiment. The original plan has been followed with little variation up to the present time; each horse of the team was ridden, and the guns were worked by the men who rode the horses. The chief advantages of this system are economy, greater exertion to be got out of the horses in a difficulty, and a smaller number of men and horses exposed to an enemy’s fire; its disadvantages are, the horses being overweighted, and a liability, from the paucity of numbers, of a gun being crippled in action by a few casualties. It may, however, after many years’ experience, be pronounced a system combining with economy a very considerable degree of efficiency. The bullocks, much improved by the arrangements of 1809, which transferred them to the care of the artillery, continued the sole draught animal of the foot artillery until 1818, when an experimental 12–pounder battery was horsed with a limited number of an inferior description of cattle: yet, under these disadvantages, so superior did this battery prove, that others were soon afterwards similarly equipped, and their numbers gradually increased until 1827, when it was decided that all the light field-batteries should be horsed; so convinced had the local Government and the Court of Directors become of the utility of the measure. But scarcely were the orders issued, when one of those extraordinary changes, so often to be met with in Indian arrangements, consequent on the change in the head of the Government, took place, and in 1828 the horses were ordered to be sold, and their place to be supplied with bullocks. Against this arrangement, destructive of the efficiency of the regiment, the representations of the commandant of artillery were of no avail; and the remonstrances of a general officer, unwilling to be left with an inefficient field-artillery, were met by the reply that the change had been resolved on “not only from motives of economy, but from a conviction that the number and efficiency of the horse artillery rendered the maintenance of horse field-batteries unnecessary;” as if the duties and use of the two branches of the arm were not quite distinct and incompatible with one another! The horse-batteries being thus extinguished, for many years there was not a foot field-battery that could be considered efficient for service; fortunately it was a period of profound peace, or the twelve troops of horse artillery would have proved but a “broken reed” to rest upon as the whole effective field-artillery of an army mustering, perhaps, 80,000 men, and scattered over a country twelve hundred miles in length, with hostile powers bordering on it in all directions.