artillery, and provided therefor by a special appropriation of $1,250,000 in the sundry civil act approved March 4, 1907. This method of appropriation was continued in the first session of the Sixtieth Congress, the sundry civil act of May 27, 1908, carrying an item of $2,139,060" for the erection of barracks and quarters for the artillery in connection with the adopted project for seacoast defenses."

The policy seems to be adopted for separating this appropriation from that for housing the mobile army, and the Chief of Coast Artillery is of the opinion that the policy is a wise one.

The following tabulation indicates the construction which has been or will be undertaken with the $3,389,060, above mentioned, so far as can be told at the present time, and also what will remain to be done in order to provide for the present authorized force of coast artillery in accordance with the plans approved by the Secretary of War November 21, 1906.

NOTE.-Old barracks and quarters now at Fort Hamilton not included in plan for reconstructing post,

a The Tuilleries are counted as 8 bachelor sets,

a Two sets of noncommissioned officers' quarters constructed at Fort Pickens in 1907.

scored 50 per cent of hits at a range of 4,500 yards, firing at the rate of one shot per gun every three minutes. During 1906 100 per cent of hits were obtained by a number of batteries at ranges of from 6,000 to 7,000 yards, firing at the rate of one shot per gun every forty-five seconds. From this it will be seen that, due to improvements in our system of fire direction and to efficient training of our coast artillery personnel, eight times as many hits from a heavy gun in a given time were obtained in 1906 as in 1900, and at a range in 1906 at which the chance of hitting is one-half as great as that at the range used in 1900. In other words, about sixteen times as many hits were made in 1906 from the same gun, in a given time, at the same range, as were made in 1900. Thus the expenditure of a comparatively small amount on our fire-control installation and by thorough training of our artillerymen, the value of our gun defenses, as estimated by their hitting capacity, was increased sixteenfold in six years.

The result of target practice for the years 1907 and 1908 show that the average battery hitting capacity has been very largely increased. Every step should be taken to hasten to completion the fire-control

tion.

installations for all existing defenses, and in order To hasten comple- that the eventual completion of this work may not be postponed it is urged that the appropriation for the next year be large enough to offset the small appropriation of this year and maintain the average rate of appropriation above mentioned. It is therefore recommended that the Secretary of War include in his estimates $1,785,009 in order to provide fire-control installations for the defenses already completed in the following harbors:

Galveston is included because it will be necessary to install some kind of fire-control system there to provide the troops with a means of drill, and it would not be in the interests of public economy to install a provisional system to be subsequently replaced by the standard system.

For the insular possessions $243,000 was appropriated by the act of May 27, 1908, for fire control, which was allotted as follows: