ere
solved by the midshipmen, and great ships-of-the-line were navigated
over imaginary shoals by unimaginable observations of the moon and the
stars, and learned lectures were delivered upon great guns, small arms,
and the curvilinear lines described by bombs in the air.

"_The Professor_" was the title bestowed upon the erudite gentleman who
conducted this seminary, and by that title alone was he known
throughout the ship. He was domiciled in the Ward-room, and circulated
there on a social par with the Purser, Surgeon, and other
_non-combatants_ and Quakers. By being advanced to the dignity of a
peerage in the Ward-room, Science and Learning were ennobled in the
person of this Professor, even as divinity was honoured in the Chaplain
enjoying the rank of a spiritual peer.

Every other afternoon, while at sea, the Professor assembled his pupils
on the half-deck, near the long twenty-four pounders. A bass drum-head
was his desk, his pupils forming a semicircle around him, seated on
shot-boxes and match-tubs.

They were in the jelly of youth, and this learned Professor poured into
their susceptible hearts all the gentle gunpowder maxims of war.
Presidents of Peace Societies and Superintendents of Sabbath-schools,
must it not have been a most interesting sight?

But the Professor himself was a noteworthy person. A tall, thin,
spectacled man, about forty years old, with a student's stoop in his
shoulders, and wearing uncommonly scanty pantaloons, exhibiting an
undue proportion of his boots. In early life he had been a cadet in the
military academy of West Point; but, becoming very weak-sighted, and
thereby in a good manner disqualified for active service in the field,
he had declined entering the army, and accepted the office of Professor
in the Navy.

His studies at West Point had thoroughly grounded him in a knowledge of
gunnery; and, as he was not a little of a pedant, it was sometimes
amusing, when the sailors were at quarters, to hear him criticise their
evolutions at the batteries. He would quote Dr. Hutton's Tracts on the
subject, also, in the original, "_The French Bombardier_," and wind up
by Italian passages from the "_Prattica Manuale dell' Artiglieria_."

Though not required by the Navy regulations to instruct his scholars in
aught but the application of mathematics to navigation, yet besides
this, and besides instructing them in the theory of gunnery, he also
sought to root them in the theory of frigat