al appliance, no matter how small, must be
in condition to perform its expected task. The complexity of a
fleet baffles any mental effort, by even those most familiar with
it, to grasp it fully. Each dreadnaught, battle cruiser, destroyer,
submarine, collier, tender, hospital ship, scout, supply ship, and
what-not, is a machine in itself, and is filled with scores--in
some cases, hundreds--of highly specialized machines, operated
by steam, oil, air, electricity, and water. A superdreadnaught
is a machine which, including the machines inside of her, costs
$15,000,000; a battle cruiser more.

The personnel is nearly as complicated as the material. Not only
are there all the various ranks of commissioned officers in the
line, medical corps, pay corps, marine corps, etc., but there are
ten kinds of warrant officers besides; while in the enlisted personnel
there are ninety-one different "ratings" in the navy, and thirteen
in the marine corps, besides temporary ratings, such as gun-pointer,
gun-trainer, gun-captain, etc. Each rank and rating carries its
rigidly prescribed duties, as well as its distinctive uniform and
pay. That such a multitudinous host of types and individuals, both
material and personnel, can be actually combined in one unit fleet,
and that fleet operated as a mobile directable organism by its
admiral, is a high achievement of the human intellect.

How is it done?

By discipline, by training, by knowledge, by energy, by devotion,
by will; by the exercise of those mental, moral, and spiritual
faculties that may be grouped under the one term "mind": the same
power that co-ordinates and controls a still more complex machine,
the organism of the human body.

Despite its relative crudeness, a fleet possesses, more fully than
any other fruit of man's endeavor, the characteristics of an organism,
defined by Webster as "an individual constituted to carry on the
activities of life by means of parts or organs more or less separate
in function, but mutually dependent." And though it must be true
that no fleet can approximate the perfection of nature's organisms,
nevertheless there is an analogy which may help us to see how a
complex fleet of complex vessels has been slowly evolved from the
simple galley fleets of earlier days; how its various parts may
be mutually dependent yet severally independent; and how all must
be made to work as one vast unit, and directed as one vast unit
by the controlling mind toward "