Twenty years later in the river of her own name, the war steamer _Mississippi_ became a formidable ram, though before this time in 1859, the French iron-clad, _La Gloire_ had been launched. It had been said of the British Admiral, Sir George Sartorius, that “He was one of the first to form, in 1855, the revolution in naval warfare, by the renewal of the ancient mode of striking an adversary with the prow.” It will be seen that Perry anticipated the Europeans and taught the Americans. Other points in this letter of Perry’s are of interest at this time. First, last, and always, Perry honored the engineer and believed in his equal possession, with the line officers, of all the soldierly virtues, notwithstanding that the man at the lever, out of sight of the enemy, must needs lack the thrilling excitement of the officers on deck. He felt that courage in the engine-room had even a finer moral strain than the more physically exciting passions of the deck. We may here note that Perry really had part in the naval victories of our civil war. The method of ramming action, as used by Farragut in his brilliant victories of wooden steamers over Confederate iron-clads, was that out-lined by Perry years before. Perry also made a thorough study, so far as it was then possible, of the problems of resistance and penetration, of rifled cannon and of iron-clad armor. He was for years on the board of officers appointed to report upon the Stevens floating battery at Hoboken. Until his death, he was familiar with the whole question, and believed in the early adoption of both rifles and armor on ships. Prior to the Mexican War he thought the right course was to develop to the highest stage of efficiency the ram and the smooth-bore shell-gun. It turned out that in the war for the Union in 1861, most of the naval officers associated with him and who shared his ideas were on the Confederate side. Hence the Southerners were in a much better state of advanced naval science than the Northerners. Even the _Monitor_ was the fruit of a private inventor, and not of a naval officer. The first appearance of an iron coat on an American war vessel, and the first ram effectively used in war were upon the Confederate steamer _Virginia_ (the old _Merrimac_) which was the idea and application of T. ap. Catesby Jones; while the _Tennessee_ in Mobile Bay was wholly the creation of Franklin Buchanan. Both of these gentlemen were life-long friends, and subordinate officers, who were also familiar with the problem of ramming, and enjoyed Perry’s confidence and ideas. For the methods of the _Merrimac_ in her devastation of the Federal fleet at Hampton Roads, the epistle of Perry might seem almost a letter of instruction.