A real system of education for the navy should be devised. The army, he said, had a Military Academy at West Point, “affording the most useful and practical education to be obtained in the country”; while the navy was forced to make out with inefficient schoolmasters on board ship, and the midshipmen secured only a practical knowledge of seamanship, the manipulation of the sextant, a few rules by rote from Bowditch’s “Epitome of Navigation”, and a knowledge of right-angled plane trigonometry. Maury claimed that a broader training was needed, and suggested the following subjects as requisite for study: drawing and naval architecture, gunnery and pyrotechny, chemistry and natural history, astronomy, mathematics, natural philosophy, navigation, tactics and discipline, gymnastics, international and maritime law, and languages (one of French, Spanish, or German and “that most difficult, arbitrary, and careful of all languages, the English”). These subjects were to be covered in a four years’ course, with a two months’ cruise each year, sometimes to foreign waters; while two years at sea after graduation and an examination at the end of that period of service were to be required before a commission in the navy was to be awarded. At first, Maury proposed merely a school-ship; but a little later after his articles had been received with such favor by the public he declared that his advocacy of a school-ship had been made solely on the grounds of expediency and that he would hail with delight the establishment of a school for the navy anywhere, even on the top of the Rocky Mountains. He thereupon suggested Memphis, Tennessee as a suitable place for the school, on the grounds that the East had the Military Academy and the West should have the naval school, and besides that this would be a favorable place for experimenting on steam vessels on the Mississippi River. Though Maury was by no means the first to suggest the need for such an institution, yet no other person contributed so much as he did towards the education of public opinion and the preparation for the eventual establishment of the Naval Academy. It is with justice, therefore, that he has often been referred to as the father of this famous institution. Continuing his discussion of the needs of the navy as to personnel, Maury recommended a reorganization and standardization of the number of officers in the various grades and a system of promotion that would keep alive the spirit and ambition of the officers. Surplus officers, he thought, might go into the merchant marine and constitute a naval reserve; while the revenue service should be taken over by the regular navy.