At one point it was necessary to throw a bridge across a river. How it was to be accomplished passed the comprehension of the engineer. But he evolved a solution which, to say the least, would be difficult to equal in originality. He built the bridge on dry land, on one bank of the river. When this was completed satisfactorily, he diverted the waterway, so that the river ran beneath the bridge through a new, specially-built channel, and the old one was filled up! In another instance, where a similar situation presented itself, a pier in the centre of the waterway became necessary. The river ran swiftly and the water was deep. The engineer knew nothing about coffer-dams, caissons, or other methods which the foreign engineer would have adopted. As the men could not work on dry land to build the bridge, he proceeded to provide them with this requisition. Hundreds of tons of spoil were dumped into the river at the point where the pier was to be erected until an island was formed, and on this the necessary constructional work was carried out. Possibly the greatest and one of the most important lines, however, is the Pekin-Hankow railway, which is 760 miles in length, and which eventually will be an important link in the great road that is under construction, whereby through communication will be provided from Kowloon via Canton, Hankow, Pekin, Mukden and Harbin to the Trans-Siberian railway. This line was carried out with Belgian and French money for the most part, and £5,000,000, or $25,000,000, was sunk in the enterprise. The undertaking was commenced in 1900, but the Boxer Rebellion interfered seriously with its progress. The insurrectionists expended their full fury upon the railway, and inflicted damage to the value of nearly £1,000,000, or $5,000,000, which, however, was paid over by the Government as compensation. It has been built cheaply, and does not compare, in point of solidity, with the English-built lines. At the same time, however, there are some outstanding engineering achievements. The most important is the bridge across the Yellow River, which consists of 102 spans, giving a total length of nearly 2 miles. It proved a particularly trying structure to erect, owing to the treacherous character of the river-bed, while the scouring action of the water, which is particularly severe, demanded elaborate protective works around the bottom of the piers. After various schemes were tried and had proved futile, large mattresses of brushwood interwoven with rushes were fashioned, and laid around the feet of the piers, hundreds of tons of heavy pieces of stone being dumped on these to keep them in position. This has been found more or less successful to prevent the soft silt from being washed away, and to protect the supports to the bridge from being undermined. The structure, however, is scarcely strong enough for heavy traffic, and consequently trains upon arrival at the ends of the bridge have the