7

      The men sleep on the upper story, which is well raised off the ground; and
the arrangements are in most respects very good, although there are some very
grave defects which I will proceed to point out. For example, no arrangement
has been made for a night-urinal en the upper floor. There is the usual urinal
below, outside the barrack; but is it likely that men getting up in the night to make
water would go downstairs, and out to this urinal, instead of, as a matter of course,
making water over or through the open iron railing round the verandah of the
barrack-room ? Indeed, this practice was acknowledged. I am of opinion that a
glazed stoneware trough should be placed in the projection over each end of the
verandah, and that the discharge-pipe from it should be fixed outside the build-
ing, and be led to a drain properly trapped, to be conveyed away to a garden.
The trough should be sluiced out every day with water.

      21. The three-gurrah filter arrangement is kept in the corner of the veran-
dah, but the one emptied in my presence contained no sand. These filters are, as
before said, a sham and a delusion, and are utterly untrustworthy.

      22. These barracks are, like " The Queen's", insufficiently lighted by one
centre-hanging and two wall oil-lanterns. The course I have recommended for
the former barracks should, in my opinion, be adopted here.

      23. The lean-to of the roof of the barrack-rooms is planked, and the central
ridge-ventilator is all that can be desired; but the air-shafts from the rooms in
the lower floor are not, as I think they should have been, carried through the roofs
by louvred openings, but appear to terminate in an opening which can be shut
by a hinged door just below the planking of the roofs in the upper storey. The
ventilation on the lower floor, consequently, is insufficient.

      24. I have now to speak of a source of great danger which ought to be im-
mediately remedied. An attempt was made to provide these barracks and their
subsidiary buildings with a system of under-ground pipe drainage. Excellent and
proper as the idea was, this system of drainage has been—through, I suppose, ignor-
ance of sanitary requirements—constructed on such erroneous principles that it is
a wonder that typhoid fever has not broken out. I am informed the system
consists of country-made—and consequently porous—earthenware pipes laid
close up to the barracks and subsidiary buildings, none of which are furnished
with traps; and all the pipes from the buildings are led straight into the under-
ground pipes, so that they form a continuation of it; and being at a higher level,
any gas given off in the under-ground drains must pass up into the pipes inside the
barracks, where the temperature is higher than in the pipe below ground. The
out-fall ends at the head of a nullah near the Quarter-Guard, but no water was
passing out. The Executive Engineer has, I am informed, no plan in his office
which shows the position of these under-ground drains; but the question of what
becomes of the sewage is not difficult to answer, as it must soak through the
porous pipes into the surrounding subsoil, leaving the solid matter, brought down,
to undergo putrefactive fermentation in the pipes. For example, in the ser-
jeant's quarters, on the upper storey of the barracks, the bath-room water con-
tained soap; and we may assume all other dirty water is also thrown into the