... "And still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he ought to know"

[Never lose sight of fact for the sake of rhyme.]

In general terms, his duties consist of:

1. Military surveys and explorations.

2. Boundary surveys.

3. Geodetic and hydrographic survey of the great lakes.

4. Building fortifications - both permanent works and temporary or field works.

5. Constructing military roads.

6. Pontoniering or building military bridges, both with the regular bridge trains and with improved materials.

7. The planning and directing of siege operations, either offensive or defensive; sapping, mining, etc.

8. Providing, testing and planting torpedoes for harbor defense when operating from shore stations.

9. Staff duty with general officers.

10. Improving rivers and harbors.

11. The building and repairing of lighthouses.

12. Various special duties as commissioner of District of Columbia, superintendent military academy, commandant engineer school, instructors at both of these schools, attaches to several foreign legations, for the collection of military information, etc.

It would, of course, exceed the proper limits of a single lecture to go into the details of these many duties, but we may take only a passing glance at most of them, and give more special attention to a few that may involve some points of interest. Perhaps the most interesting branch of the subject would be that of permanent fortifications, or what amounts to almost the same thing in this country, sea coast defenses. And here our trouble begins, for, while civil engineers have constant experience to guide them, their roads, bridges, and other structures being in constant use, the military engineer has only now and then, at long intervals, a war or a siege of sufficient extent to furnish data upon which he can safely plan or build his structures. Imagine a civil engineer designing a bridge, road, or a dam to meet some possible future demand, without having seen such a structure used for twenty years or more, and you can form some estimate of the delightful uncertainties that surround the military engineer when called upon to design a modern fort. The proving ground shows him that radical improvements are necessary, but actual service conditions are almost entirely wanting, and such as we have contradict many of the proving ground theories.

Thus we have the records of shot going through 25 inches of iron or 25 feet of concrete on the proving ground; but such actual service tests as the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Fort Fisher, and the forts at Alexandria contradict this entirely, and indicate that, except for the moral effect, our old forts, with modern guns in them and some additional strengthening at their weaker points, would answer all purposes so far as bombardment from fleets is concerned. This is not saying that the forts are good enough in their present condition, but simply that they can readily be made far superior in strength, both offensive and defensive, to any fleet that could possibly be provided at anything like the same expense, or in fact at any expense that would be justified by the condition of our treasury, either past, present, or probable future. It might be added that a still more serious difficulty in the way of the military engineer, so far as practice and its consequent experiences are concerned, is that for many years past, until quite recently, there have been no funds either for experiments or actual work on fortifications, so that very little has been done on them during the last twenty years.

Without going into the question of the necessity for sea coast defenses, we may assume that an enemy is likely to come into one of our harbors and that it is desirable to keep him out. What provisions must be made to accomplish this, i.e., to secure the safety of the harbors and the millions of dollars' worth of destructible property concentrated at the great trade centers that are usually located upon those harbors? We must first take a look at the enemy and see what he is like before we can decide what will be needed to repel his attack. For this purpose we need not draw on the imagination, but we may simply examine some of the more recent armadas sent to bombard seaports. For example, the fleet sent by Great Britain to bombard the Egyptian city of Alexandria, in 1882. This fleet consisted of eight heavy ironclad ships of from 5,000 to 11,000 tons displacement and five or six smaller vessels; and the armament of this squadron numbered more than one hundred guns of all calibers, from the sixteen inch rifle down to the seven inch rifle, besides several smaller guns. But this fleet represented only a small fraction of England's naval power. During some recent evolutions she turned out thirty-six heavy ironclads and forty smaller vessels and torpedo boats. The crews of these vessels numbered nearly 19,000 officers and men, or about three times the entire number in our navy.

Such a fleet, or, more likely, a much larger one, might appear at the entrance say of New York harbor within ten days after a declaration of war, and demand whatever the nation to which it belonged might choose, with the alternative of bombardment.

The problem of protecting our people and property from such attacks is not a new one, and, in fact, most of the conditions of this problem remain the same as they were fifty years ago, the differences being in degree rather than in kind. The most natural thought would be to meet such a fleet by another fleet, but the folly of such a course will become apparent from a moment's consideration. The difficulties would be:

1st. Our fleet must be decidedly stronger than that of the enemy, or we simply fight a duel with an equal chance of success or failure.

2d. In such a duel the enemy would risk nothing but the loss of his fleet, and even a portion of that would be likely to escape, but we would not only risk a similar loss, but we would also lose the city or subject it to the payment of a heavy contribution to the enemy.