Brave Rodney made the French to rue The Twelfth of April 'Eighty two. _Old Song._ The West Indies is the Station for honour. Nelson. '_Who can feel any pride in a mere blustering adjective? We do seriously believe that the Admiralty would add something to the popularisation of the navy by a reform of the naming system. It is proper enough to christen new ships after famous old vessels of the past, and the 'Admirals' also are very proper and pleasant, but why this mania for adjectives and such futilities?_' So a London newspaper commented on the selection of the name _Formidable_ for the great first-class battleship that to-day bears that name proudly lettered at her stern. Well, we shall see what we shall see. When all is said and done, it may appear, perhaps, that some of us are not so unreasonable after all in taking pride in seeing this 'blustering adjective' inscribed as a man-of-war name on the roll of our modern British fleet. Handsome is, every nursery knows, that handsome does. It is more than highly probable that should the day for 'the real thing,' as Mr. Kipling calls it, come in our present _Formidable's_ time, those to whose lot it may fall to face the _Formidable_ from the enemy's side will think that, in regard to this particular ship at least, there is something in a name. This is the sort of vessel that our twentieth-century battleship the _Formidable_ is, glancing at some of her points--the details on which she relies to make good the intention of her name. Hard hitting is the _Formidable's_ business in life, so to speak, her _raison d'etre_; her forte, the dealing of knock-down blows. To that end she carries the most powerful guns in existence: 50-ton breech-loaders, a foot in diameter in the bore; capable of hurling gigantic shells each between three and four feet long and weighing 850 lbs., or 7-1/2 cwts., with a bursting charge of three-quarters of a hundredweight of powder or lyddite, through three feet of iron at a mile and a half off, or all the way across from Shakespeare's Cliff at Dover on to the sand dunes round Calais. Each firing charge of cordite weighs by itself nearly 2 cwts.--the weight of a sack of coal as delivered at a house-holder's door from a tradesman's cart,--and each gun by itself takes a year to construct. The _Formidable's_ guns could silence the old 'Woolwich Infants' and the mighty 80-ton guns that the famous _Inflexible_ carried, from a range miles beyond the farthest that the older guns could reach. Yet these less than twenty years ago were reckoned a wonder of the world. A finger's pressure, nothing more, The ponderous cannon's thund'ring roar, A passing cloud of smoke, and lo! The waves engulf the haughty foe!