Perhaps the most frequent cause of wreck, especially on our own coast, is negligence on the part of the master. If we analyze the cases of collision that occurred in the year 1857, we are surprised to find that by far the larger portion of them occur in the open sea, and in clear bright weather. Out of 277 collisions, involving total and partial loss, bad look-out was the cause of 88, and neglect of the rule of the road of 33 collisions. It is a saying among sailors that if the three L's are attended to--Lead, Latitude, and Look-out,--a ship is safe; and no more apt saying could have been uttered. Simple as the casting of the lead is, it is almost invariably found, when the causes of wreck are inquired into, that this precaution has been neglected. The _Ava_ mail-steamer was undoubtedly lost off Trincomalee, in February last, owing to this omission. The lead is not only capable of telling the soundings, which alone would warn the mariner of the approach of shoal water; but, when armed, it is capable of bringing a voice from the deep to say on what coast the ship may be. Had the masters of either the _Reliance_ or _Conqueror_ cast the lead, they would not only have known that their vessel were getting into shallow water, but that they were upon the French coast; for the lead brings up a coarser sand from the shores of our neighbours than from the opposite coast on the English side. The question of latitude is a question which tests the nautical knowledge of the captain. A man who can take celestial observations correctly is not very likely to be deficient in a knowledge of navigation. The differences between masters of ships in this respect are very marked. Captain Basil Hall tells us, in his "Fragments of Voyages and Travels," that on a voyage from California to Rio, the first land he saw was on either side of him, upon the clearing off of a fog at the entrance of Rio de Janeiro. With no other guide than science he had hit his port without sighting land, after a voyage of many thousand miles. With this we may contrast a case given in the Report on Shipwrecks for 1836, in which the brig _Henry_, of Cork, bound to St. John's, New Brunswick, with seventy passengers on board, was fallen in with by the _Andromeda_, of New York, in a starving condition; her master, by his own reckoning, being 800 miles to the westward of his true position. This man must have been one of those who, as the sailors say, "come in at the cabin windows, instead of working his way up through the hawse-holes." Errors of this kind are not likely to occur so often as formerly, thanks to the working of the Mercantile Marine Act, which will, we think, prevent the recurrence of the grosser mistakes in navigation. No greater blessing was ever conferred on the merchant shipping of this country than a law which compels the holding an inquiry by competent persons in all cases of casualty. It is abused, as any measure is sure to be that rigidly sets its