construction of course excepted." It was this Commission, as Miss Nightingale said afterwards to Lord Shaftesbury, that "saved the British Army." In Dr. Sutherland, the head of the Sanitary Commission, Miss Nightingale found a warm admirer and a stout supporter. During his stay at Scutari he acted as her physician. On her return to England she was on terms of intimate friendship with him and his wife; and Dr. Sutherland was, as we shall hear, one of her close allies in the battle for reform in army hygiene. With Mr. (afterwards Sir Robert) Rawlinson she also formed a friendship which lasted to the end of his life. Dr. Gavin died in the Crimea during the work of the Commission. [129] See, on these two points, above, p. 206, and below, p. 242. [130] In a letter to Colonel Lefroy, Aug. 25, 1856. [131] Hodder's _Life of Lord Shaftesbury_, pp. 503 _seq_. [132] _Report of the Sanitary Commission_, March 1857. [133] For the figures, see below, pp. 254, 314. In the matter of stores, whatever suggestions or requisitions Miss Nightingale sent home were complied with by Government. But it was one thing to send stores out, and quite another to secure that they should arrive when and where they were wanted. "Sidney," wrote Mrs. Herbert to Mrs. Bracebridge (Nov. 17, '54), "has sent heaps of armchairs, etnas, and other comforts, but is in terrible fear that they may have been carried on with the troops to Balaclava from some blunder." Miss Nightingale's unerring eye for detail and perception of the point saw where the evil lay. First, there was no co-ordination among the departments at home in packing the things. The _Prince_ (the wreck of which in the famous hurricane of November 14 was disastrous to the welfare of the soldiers) "had on board," she wrote, "a quantity of medical comforts for us, which were so packed under shot and shell as that it was found impossible to disembark them here, and they went to Balaclava and were lost." But there was a second obstacle. The army had encamped at Scutari as early as May 1854, but it had occurred to nobody to establish either there or at Constantinople an office for the reception and delivery of goods. Packages, intended for the army or the hospitals, if they arrived in merchant vessels, were detained in the Turkish Custom House, from which they were never extracted without much delay, difficulty, and confusion; many were partially or entirely destroyed; and many abstracted and totally lost. "The Custom House," said Miss Nightingale, "was a bottomless pit, whence nothing ever issued of all that was thrown in." In the case of ships chartered by the Government, great masses of goods were necessarily landed together and stowed away promiscuously for want of time and space for sorting, and were often delayed by an unnecessary trip to Balaclava and back again. There were occasions in which vessels containing hospital stores, as well as munitions of war, made three voyages to and fro before the