( 107 ) 
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN 
BY 
LIEUT.-COLONEL W. H. H. WATERS, M.V.O., D.A.A.G. 
(A Lecture delivered at the Boyal Artillery Institution, Woolwich, Thursday 8th Dec., 1898). 
Colonel F. A. Yorke, R.A., in the chaie. 
T HE Chairman :—Ladies and Gentlemen, you will allow me to in¬ 
troduce to you Colonel W. H. H. Waters, who is kindly going 
to give us the Lecture; although some of us may not know him per¬ 
sonally, we all know him very well by name (applause). 
Lieut.-Colonel Waters :—Colonel Yorke, ladies and gentlemen, 
I will ask you to allow me to make a few preliminary remarks. 
In the first place you will understand that, being on full pay, I had 
to subject my lecture to the approval of the Authorities at the Foreign 
Office, who were my late masters, and therefore, I shall be obliged to 
read it, and keep to what I have laid before them. I am also, of 
course, precluded from entering into a discussion of any political 
theories; I do not know that they would interest you very much if I 
did, but, at any rate, I am not allowed to do so. 
Then there is another thing that I very much regret, which is, that 
I have no lantern slides. I took a camera with me to Siberia, which 
acted very well at first, but, unfortunately, when I got to a place on the 
Amur river, I met a party of Chinese soldiers dressed in petticoats 
and I hired them to allow me to photograph them ; at that particular 
moment my camera went wrong, and it never acted again until it was 
repaired after my return to England. 
The title, to which my attention was drawn by an announce¬ 
ment in the press, is rather a misnomer , because it is stated that 
I am to give a lecture on the Trans-Siberian Railroad; although 
the greater part of the paper is devoted more or less directly to that 
subject, still I thought it well to introduce a few other items of greater 
or less interest besides merely the railway. 
In discoursing briefly on the huge dependency of Russia, called 
Siberia, it is somewhat difficult to decide what to say and what to omit. 
Too much vagueness would render it altogether devoid of interest, 
while too many details would weary any audience not especially in¬ 
terested in the country. 
The map before you is drawn on a scale of sixty-six miles to an inch, 
and even then it is a very large one. But the superficial area of Siberia 
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