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Rh the work was commenced and the sum of $3,090 spent on it. The main burden of the work fell therefore upon the next administration. As regards public works, Sir John's term of office is chiefly remarkable for the number of important works discussed, declared urgent and rejected or postponed. On 12th November, 1878, the foreign property owners of Hongkong memorialized the Governor, asking that the Praya road be widened 20 feet, by proportionate reclamation of the foreshore, in connection with the reconstruction of the Praya wall. This proposal, a sensible and modest anticipation of the more ambitious reclamation scheme started ten years later, was rejected on the ground that it would delay the re-construction of the Praya wall. Again, after the fire of 25th December, 1878, which laid a large area of houses in the overcrowded central portion of the town in ashes, it was strongly urged upon Sir John that he should use this opportunity for widening, and improving the direction of, the streets of that district, but the suggestion was rejected as too costly. The erection of a new Gaol on the separate system, though indispensable for the effectiveness of the Governor's scheme of repressing crime without flogging, was indefinitely postponed by Sir John for financial reasons. The construction of new Central School buildings, for which a costly site had been purchased and cleared of houses, was postponed from year to year under various pretexts, and left untouched. The Taitam waterworks, the plans for which had been elaborated and approved under the previous administration. Sir John fought shy of for years, and when at last the Colonial Office sent out peremptory orders that the work should be commenced at once. Sir John, for purely financial reasons, took it upon himself to disregard the commands he received from Downing Street, and the work was not commenced until 1882, on the eve of his departure. The same was the case with the Kowloon Observatory. This scheme was first mooted in spring 1877, when some shipmasters and the manager of the P. & O. Company circulated for signature a petition requesting the Government to arrange for the daily