director, or contractor; sometimes working nominally for the company, but really for the contractor,--or in some cases, so debased is this class of persons, for both contractor and company openly. Of late years this prostitution of mongrel engineers has had place to an alarming extent. Let us hope that the old professional pride, and, better still, a love of truth and honesty for their own sake, may yet triumph, and place real engineers high above the dead level to which ignorance and pretence and venality have degraded the profession. [Footnote 1: _Handbook of Railroad Construction_, for the Use of American Engineers. By GEORGE L. VOSE, Civil Engineer. Boston and Cambridge: James Munroe & Company. 1857. _Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Reports_, from 1830 to 1850. BENJAMIN H. LATROBE, Chief Engineer. _Railways and their Management_, being a Pamphlet written by JAMES M. WHITON, ESQ., late of the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad. 1856. _Report of the President, Treasurer, and General Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad Company to the Stockholders_. March, 1856. _Final Report of_ JOHN A. ROEBLING, _Civil Engineer on the Niagara Railway Suspension-Bridge_, May, 1855.] [Footnote 2: Lest these statements should sound extravagant, the reader will please reckon up the amounts for himself. A bank twenty-five feet wide on top, eight hundred feet long, and two hundred and thirty feet high, would contain two million cubic yards of earth; which, at twenty-five cents per yard, would cost half a million of dollars, exclusive of a culvert to pass the river, of sixty, eighty, or one hundred feet span and seven hundred feet long. Twenty trains per day, of thirty cars each, one car holding two yards, would be twelve hundred yards per day; two million, divided by twelve hundred, gives 1,666 days.]