given, and for His own wise purposes probably never will give us complete power to control and subdue them. No matter how highly timber used for sleepers on Indian railways may be saturated with creosote, or any other analogous preparation, they are all powerless to resist the ravages of the red ant. Iron “pot” sleepers have therefore been generally adopted, and they have been found very serviceable, especially on lines where the speed is not high. Some of the engineers are in their favour, even where trains are run at high velocities. Thus the District Engineer and the Locomotive Superintendent of the Punjaub Railway report strongly in recommendation of them. “I have never,” says the latter, “travelled over a finer piece of road, than the seventy to eighty miles of pot sleepers road laid between Montgomery and Mooltan. Our speed does not exceed thirty-five miles per hour, and I have never heard of breakages to permanent way resulting from this rate.” The agent to the Madras Railway Company says, “I have all along strongly advocated the use of cast-iron pot sleepers upon our lines of railway, believing that a road laid with iron was more easily and economically maintained, insured greater safety from accidents, and from its smoothness of surface, less prejudicial in its effects upon our rolling stock than any other form of roadway.” In 1862 Mr. Henry Rouse, the Chief Resident Engineer to the Egyptian Railway, in the course of a report upon the use of these sleepers, says, “I may assert with unerring confidence, that after ten years’ use of them, had a system of permanent way to be again selected for adoption on the fine alluvial soil of Egypt, no more fitting choice could be made than was, in fact, made by Mr. Robert Stephenson in 1851, when he determined on the adoption of Greaves’s cast-iron pot sleeper road.”