has always been of subordinate importance. The great naval station of France on the Ocean has been at the magnificent harbour of Brest. Toulon, the naval station of the Mediterranean, is also a fine natural harbour. The mechanical ingenuity of the French has always been shown in shipbuilding. It was comparatively easy for Colbert to provide fine vessels. Some of the noblest warships of the time were built under his directions. These were the ships which excited the admiration of Charles II. and his brother, when the Count D’Estrées brought his squadron to Portsmouth at the beginning of the Third Dutch War. It was less easy to form a corps of officers and to collect crews. Although France possesses some excellent seamen in Normandy and Brittany, the maritime population has never been large. There were few experienced officers, either gentleman or tarpaulin, to command the king’s ships. The seamen of Dieppe, St. Malo, or Havre were daring. They had invaded the Spanish West Indies before Hawkins made his first voyage, but they were not numerous enough to supply the king with an equivalent for the large body of ship’s captains trained among ourselves by the Civil War and the wars with the Dutch. Besides, they were hardly the men to whom a king of France would have cared to entrust the honour of his flag. In the early years of the king’s reign it was found necessary to give the command of fleets and individual ships to mere gentlemen who were not only not seamen, but who looked down upon those who were, with all the contempt usually shown by the French _noblesse_ for mechanics. This partly accounts for the ineptitude shown by French naval officers during the naval campaigns of 1672 and 1673. The exertions of Colbert did much to remedy this defect. By twenty years of hard work and the most energetic driving, he formed a naval organisation. The orders issued for this purpose were so numerous that it was found necessary to reduce them to a Code. Colbert began the work, but did not live to finish it. On his death in 1683 he was succeeded by his son Colbert de Seignelay, who continued what his father had begun. The famous _Ordonnance_, or Code of Law of the old French Royal Navy, was at last completed, and by a curious coincidence it was promulgated in April 1689, in the month before the beginning of the war with England.