visions, and water. The crew built a cistern, and for fifteen months this novel sloop-of-war did great injury to the French shipping going to and from the neighboring harbor, now called Fort-de-France, until June 1, 1805, when she surrendered, for want of powder, to a French squadron of two seventy-fours, a corvette, a schooner, and eleven gunboats. In this engagement the stone sloop-of-war, Diamond Rock, killed and wounded seventy men and destroyed three gunboats, with a loss to herself of two killed and one wounded.

Reading this story as quoted by Kingsley from "Naval Chronicles," Vol. XII, p. 206, and passing Diamond Rock in 1899, and remembering my application made many years before for a caveat on a revolving vessel, I was led to invent an armored globular battery, for which the United States and foreign governments have granted me patents. After talking with some prominent naval men, I have come to think it of sufficient importance to ask the Club to look for a moment at photographs of preliminary sketches, which will explain my floating fort.

The fifteen-inch guns are rigidly fixed to the globular battery, so far as their aim is concerned. The elevation is effected by tilting the whole globular battery. This is done by weighted cars moving on sectional tracks. The azimuths are regulated by four screw-propellers, which revolve the battery horizontally, and have also the faculty of moving it slowly from place to place.1

THE GREAT DISASTER AT ST. PIERRE

FEBRUARY 23d, we stopped at Fort-de-France, and obtained a permit to land at St. Pierre, which we then visited, going ashore and also rowing close to the sea-wall and ruins along the whole water-front of the dead city.

This picture shows St. Pierre as it was before the eruption of May 8, 1902.

This picture shows St. Pierre after the unparalleled disaster which in five minutes destroyed this beautiful and prosperous city and thirty thousand inhabitants.

When I visited St. Pierre in 1902, we went up Mt. Pelée as far as Fontaine Chaude, where a considerable stream of hot sulphur-water then flowed out of the mountain. Fontaine Chaude was, in my opinion, the precise point where the