They are the nurses of the line, and dry-nurses are of no use to locomotives.
The truth is that I have never seen such a bare, arid country, so clear of vegetation; and it extends for one hundred and fifty miles from Uzun Ada.

When General Annenkof commenced his works at Mikhailov, he was obliged to distil the water from the Caspian Sea, as if he were on board ship.

But if water is necessary to produce steam, coal is necessary to vaporize the water.

The readers of the _Twentieth Century_ will ask how are the furnaces fed in a country in which there is neither coal nor wood?
Are there stores of these things at the principal stations of the Transcaspian?
Not at all.

They have simply put in practice an idea which occurred to our great chemist, Sainte-Claire Deville, when first petroleum was used in France.