who enters at sixteen) quite old enough to do a man's duty. I think we make a great mistake in keeping these boys as boys after eighteen, any longer than we can avoid; it would be much better to follow the English practice and make them part of the general force of the service, not nursing them longer than we can help, but letting them take their chances with the other men. I see no difficulty in the way of such a system as this I have sketched, turning out well. After it is once in good working order enough boys could be supplied in every four months to make up the cruising training ship's complement of about two hundred boys. It has been proposed. that there should be stated times of entry, and a fixed time at which all the entries of the year should go to sea. I think this would be a great mistake, and one which would militate greatly against our success. We want an elastic system in which a boy can be entered at any time and be sent away at any time he is fitted to go, certain limits being settled upon of course, but the general idea is to give a year's training at the depot, and a six months' cruise afloat. The ships used for the latter service should go to sea and stay at sea as much as possible. Make these months a time of hard work-give the ship a limited number of selected men, not more than thirty or forty at farthest, which is more than the total number a merchant ship of like tonnage or size would carry. Immediately after the return from sea and the dismantling of their late ship, the boys should be distributed in service-and here comes. an important consideration. Should these boys go as a small fraction of a ship's company? I say, emphatically, no. With the present class of men which we have in the service such a method is ruinous. Let them form the large majority of the crews of our smaller ships, and have the older hands of these ships, as much as possible, selected men. When our service is largely made up of the persons we are now training, our present plan will be a safe one but not until then. They are now looked upon by the old men as a privileged class, as interlopers, and are unquestionably ill treated by them, learning nothing as a rule from them but the vice natural to the class we have heretofore enlisted and being drawn by them into most of the offenses for which they have suffered court martial. As to the place for this central station, I think everything points to Narragansett bay as being almost perfectly suited for such purposes; deep water, secure anchorage, a climate far milder than that of any other point near this latitude, its being the center of a great sea-faring population, are a union of advantages which no other place can show. : New London is in winter much colder; the river at the Navy Yard is much too small and narrow for exercises, and subject to being frozen over in winter; the station is at a considerable distance from the sound so that much time would be spent in going and coming by the small exercising vessels proposed, and lastly there is no room for gunnery practice. These are all disadvantages which militate much against it. Farther, and this should have great weight, the Torpedo station is at Newport. We must in time also train our men in the exercise and handling of torpedoes, and why not have the school at hand instead of far away? Combined, too, with the central station should be the gunnery school of our boys and seamen so that there should be no necessity of a transfer to a new locality or to new officers for this important training. No place can be found more suitable for this than Narragansett Bay. A question was lately asked in a Boston paper, "What are Naval officers doing for the improvement of the Navy?" This question of training is a most important improvement immediately at hand for all to work on. It is a thing which demands the deepest attention and consideration and it is a question largely in our hands to solve. It is one which may and should have noble results, and it will be a great shame to the Service at large and to ourselves individually if these results are not achieved. THE CHAIRMAN:-I am sure the meeting will join me in thanking Lieut. Comd'r Chadwick for his very excellent and interesting paper. I entirely agree with him that the training system should be under one head; the treatment of the boys should be mild, not sentimental. and that the details should be thoroughly carried out. The officers should sympathize with the aim of the system and should be able to enter into the spirit of the boys. It is a very appropriate time to agitate the question, now that the time for the re-organization and re-construction of the Navy seems at hand. I also think that when the boys are placed on board ship in service, they should form the greater part rather than the smaller part of the ship's company, or rather be sent as ordinary seamen, when they know more than those who are filling such places. This until the training system supplies the service. Lieut. WM. Mc CARTY LITTLE-I agree very thoroughly with the ideas and suggestions advanced by Lieut. Comd'r Chadwick; so much so that there is but little room for discussion. On board of the Minnesota the boys are shipped between the years of fifteen and eighteen. We have found, in developing the system of training in Seamanship and Gunnery, lamentable ignorance on the part of petty officers and seamen, from whom we would draw our supply of sub-instructors. This is particularly the case in regard to the ignorance of details of their work. It is my opinion that in any system of instruction, the details in all work, can not be given afloat alone, but appliances on shore and small ships are essential. A four months' cruise during the year I should prefer to one of six weeks. In addition, a system of sending men back to the training station for a post graduate course for petty officers I would suggest as most desirable. From my experience on the Minnesota I should strongly urge a stated course, and that the boys should not be taken from the training ship until this course is finished; but if the boys are taken from the training ship or sent to it without regard to the state of their instruction, or to any system, of course the results are meagre and in the highest degree unsatisfactory to the instructors and to the service at large, besides being very unjust to any system. Furthermore, as it has been justly stated, any one plan is better than a variety of systems carried out in a desultory manner, so I thoroughly agree in the suggestion in regard to the great desirability of a single head. From the experience obtained at the rendezvous of training ships at Hampton Roads the present lack of unity was most evident; each ship had its own system and there was a great indifference to the system, and experience of others. The desideratum seemed to be independence of others. It is certainly of great advantage to have a central station and a uniform continuous system; and, to my mind, Narragansett bay affords a better place than New London for such a station. Lieut. BROWN.-In regard to elevating the character and moral tone of the seamen of the Service, in my opinion, much can be done by more considerate treatment. If ships are made prisons we can only expect to have jail birds willing to serve in them. In my short experience I have repeatedly known of men being kept on board ship six months at a time. I can see no reason why the crew should not be allowed to go ashore under similar regulations to those which now apply to the officers. Then in regard to money. I have known men to come home from a foreign cruise with plenty of money on the books, but they had been deprived of it during the cruise only to enable them to go on an extended spree upon being discharged. The money earned by the seaman is his, just as much as that earned by the officer belongs to him. If he (the seaman) is unwilling to save it up on the Paymaster's books, so as to have it at the end of the cruise, it is useless to make him do it with the hope that he will properly expend it after his discharge. In the vessel under my command every man is required to keep one month's pay on the books, he can draw the rest if he desires, and every one is entitled to go ashore every other even ing. Misconduct, as a rule, is punished by other methods than by restricting money or liberty. I have during the last eighteen months carried out these regulations and have no reason to desire to change them. Lieut. B. NoYES.-I would like to ask Lieut.-Comdr. Chadwick the percentage of boys that re-enlist under the English system; also in regard to the sub-instructors, who compose the drill masters and the schoolmasters. I think on the Minnesota our tendency is to approximate to the English system, though we cannot depend upon having the boys through any stated course. Lieut.-Comd'r. CHADWICK.-In answer to the question of Lieut. Noyes, I would say that I cannot state the exact percentage of those who have passed through the training ships, who re-enlist after the first discharge, which takes place at the age of twenty eight but it must be very large, as so far as I could find, nearly all the blue jackets, or at least a vast majority, had been training ship boys. In answer to the other question I would state that most of the drillmasters are graduates of the training system, and that all of them are men who have been passed through a long course on board the Excellent or Cambridge; the schoolmasters are when boys, selected from the boys of the Greenwich hospital school for the sons of seamen. They are given a six years course of study and of duty as pupil teachers on board the training ships and at the school itself. The course is a very rigorous one and turns out a high class of men. All boys on leaving the training ships are drafted for general duty in vessels of all kinds. Of course only a limited number of the young ordinary seamen can receive the extra training I speak of in the Atlanta. I would state again that all boys are rated ordinary seamen, or ordinary seamen 2d class, when they are eighteen. Under no circumstances can the rating of boys be retained after eighteen and one half. NAVAL INSTITUTE, ANNAPOLIS, March 3d, 1880. PROFESSOR N. M. TERRY, U. S. N. A., in the Chair. SYNOPSIS OF A LECTURE ON COLOR BLINDNESS AND ITS DANGERS ON THE SEA. BY B. JOY JEFFRIES, M. D. I need not remind the members of the Institute that there is danger in the inability to distinguish instantly and accurately the color of the red and green side lights, the colors of signal flags, of buoys, marks, and light-houses. The extent of the danger will of course depend on the number of people having any chromatic defect of vision and how complete this is. Now, although warnings were given as to the frequency of color blindness and its dangers on land and sea as long ago as 1854 it has since then, as before, been regarded by the general community, as, an infrequent, rather scientific curiosity. Its great practical importance on the sea and on railroads has only been brought forward and explained to the community during the last five years, most notably by Prof. Holmgren of Upsala, Sweden. His monograph excited a great deal of attention as soon as it appeared in French and German. A brief translation of it is in the Smithsonian Reports. It is also incorporated in my volume on "Color blindness, its Dangers and Detection," now adopted as a manual for the medical officers of the U. S. Army, Navy, and Marine-Hospital Service. Perusal of this monograph will convince any one of the truth of what I would here say in reference to the frequency of this defect, its peculiarities, and the methods of detecting it. It is only in the centre that the normal retina has the fullest power of form perception. This is also the case in reference to color. The perceptive elements of the retina are more frequent and more closely packed at the centre, decreasing outward to its limits at the exterior portion of the eye. A practical point is to be recalled in reference to the use of color for signals, viz., that a very simple eye is needed to receive color impression and transmit it to the brain, whilst for form perception the eye requires all its dioptric apparatus, and this also in |