In England, Commander Gallwey does not hesitate to say that the torpedo-boat is for harbor defence so superior to the submarine mine that he would not be surprised if before long it superseded the latter altogether. In France, Charmes insists that an armored vessel will run the most serious risk if a torpedo-boat is allowed to approach unobserved to within one thousand to fifteen hundred feet; that the torpedo will surely triumph over the iron-clad, and that armor has been vanquished, not by the gun, but by the torpedo. A NAVAL RESERVE. Among the problems to be solved by an efficient naval administration there is none more difficult or of greater importance than the formation of reserves of seamen. Our late war exposed the nation’s weakness in sailors. At the beginning of hostilities the fleet, on paper, consisted of forty-two ships of all classes, mainly sailing-vessels, with a few paddle-wheel steamers, and less than ten screw-vessels with auxiliary power. Its _personnel_ comprised seven thousand of all grades. And yet, to blockade a coast of over three thousand miles in length, the Secretary of the Navy had at his disposal but three effective vessels, and a reserve of only two hundred seamen on all the receiving-ships and at all the naval stations. As late as the first of July, 1863, there were not men enough to carry out efficiently the work imposed upon the navy, and of the thirty-four thousand blue-jackets twenty-five thousand were landsmen. Secretary Welles, at the end of the same year, complained that there were no reserve seamen, that the supply for immediate and imperative duties was so inadequate that one of the largest and fastest steamers destined for important foreign service had been detained for months in consequence of the need of a crew, and that many other vessels were very much short of their complements. The cause of this was want of foresight, of prudence, of national common-sense even. We did not lack the material from which crews could have been drawn, for in 1860 over seventy-five thousand men sailed in the American merchant marine, fifty thousand of whom, under any system of enrolment suited to our national instincts and prejudices, would, before the end of 1861, have been available for duty on shipboard.