or.

[Footnote A: Sheet-iron plates of one inch in thickness weigh forty
pounds per superficial foot.]

While our Government slept upon its unfinished frigate, and forgot
the honor and interest of the country in the lap of the siren of the
South,--of that South which sixty years since broke down the navy of
John Adams, and left us to encounter the embargo and war with England
without a navy, or, at most, with a few frigates which sufficed to show
what the navy of Adams might have effected,--the honor of launching the
first iron-clad steamer, the Gloire, was resigned to the French. The
first Napoleon made the army of France the best in Europe, if not in the
world; the third, while he maintains the standing of the army, aspires
to give the same position to her navy.

In 1854, Napoleon, who had long studied the art of war, and during his
stay in New York had doubtless seen or heard of the floating battery,
determined to construct two such batteries, and accordingly built the
Lave and Tonnerre. With one of these, the Lave, during the Russian War,
he assailed and destroyed in the brief space of one hour the strong
fortress of Kinburn, near Sebastopol; and in striking contrast to this
success, a large British steamship, heavily armed, but constructed of
wood, was actually captured near Odessa by a small party of Russians
with two or three thirty-two-pounders worked through a gap in an
embankment.

The invulnerable battery of France anchored close under the fortress.
Before its cannon, granite walls are shivered into fragments most
dangerous to the gunners, while the shells, burying themselves two or
three feet deep in the brickwork, by their explosion shake the walls to
pieces. Iron, protected by iron, triumphed over both bricks and granite,
which had defied the fleet of England.

The Emperor was not slow to realize the result of the problem he had
solved. He at once proceeded to test the strength of the best kinds of
plate made in his dominions, and found, by actual trial, that plates of
the best iron, but four and three-fourths inches in thickness, were able
to resist repeated shocks of solid balls fired at the distance of twenty
metres (less than four rods) from his sixty-eight-pounders, and from
rifled guns throwing shot of nearly the same calibre,--and this, too,
when the balls were impelled by more than one-fourth their weight of
powder. But ships rarely engage at such close quarters either with
vessels or fortres