This was the greatest achievement of a single torpedo during our war and served to stimulate the Confederate authorities to renewed vigour. Thenceforward, the Bay of Mobile and adjacent waters became the chief scenes of torpedo operation. Genl. Maury stated that he had caused to be placed 180 in her channel and waterways, that they held the powerful fleet of Admiral Farragut for ten months at bay, and destroyed fully a dozen United States vessels, of which six were gunboats and four were monitors. Regular torpedo stations were established in Richmond, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah and Mobile, at which sixty naval officers and men were on duty, preparing these new engines of war. The channel-ways, rivers and harbours were protected by them from Virginia to Texas. Sometimes a hundred were taken out of James River in a single day, and when the Southern seaports fell hundreds of torpedoes were found floating in their waters ready to explode upon the first contact. At first the older Confederate officers who regarded them with disfavour, as Captain Wm. H. Parker says he did, were now "torpedo mad." "Commodore Tucker and I," he said, "had torpedo on the brain," and the destruction of the enemy's vessels increased so rapidly that in the last ten months of the war forty or fifty were blown up, and in the last three weeks ten or more were destroyed. Its possibilities became better and better appreciated every day. Think of the destruction this machine affected, and bear in mind its use came to be fairly understood only during the last part of the war. During that period, when but few Federal vessels were lost and fewer still severely damaged by the most powerful guns in use, we find this long line of disasters from the Confederate use of this new and in the beginning despised comer into the arena of naval warfare. Our successes have made the torpedo a name spoken of with loathing and contempt by the self-sufficient Yankee, a recognized factor in modern naval warfare, and now we see on all sides the greatest activity and genius in improving it.