The second prediction followed naturally from the first. With machinery being dictated to us as the motive power instead of sails, officers and men would have to become Engineers, and discipline would be better, and so you would not require to have Marines to shoot the sailors in case of mutiny. Now this does sound curious, but again it is so obvious. When the sails were the motive power, the best Petty Officers--that is to say, the smartest of the seamen--got their positions, not by good conduct, but by their temerity aloft, and the man who hauled out the weather-earing in reefing topsails in a gale of wind and balanced himself on his stomach on a topsail yard, with the ship in a mountainous sea, was a man you had to have in a leading position, whatever his conduct was. But once the sails were done away with and there was no going aloft, then the whole ship’s company became what may be called “good conduct” men, and could be Marines, or, if you liked to call them so, Sailors. One plan I had was to do away with the sailors; and another plan I had was to do away with Marines. I plumped for the sailors, though I loved the Marines. In December, 1868, I predicted and patented a sympathetic exploder for submarine mines. In the last year of the war this very invention proved to be the most deadly of all species of submarine mines. Quite a different sort of prediction occurs in a letter I wrote to Sir Maurice Hankey in 1910, and of which he reminded me in the following letter: LETTER FROM SIR M. HANKEY, K.C.B. (SECRETARY TO THE WAR CABINET). OFFICES OF THE WAR CABINET, 2, WHITEHALL GARDENS, S.W. _May 28th, 1917._ MY DEAR LORD FISHER, I am sending your letter along to my wife and asking her to write to you and send both a copy of your letter to me in 1910 about Mr. Asquith’s leaving office in November, 1916,[13] and also to write to you about your prophecy of war with Germany beginning in 1914, and Sir John Jellicoe being in command of the Grand Fleet when war broke out. I have the clearest recollection of the incident. My wife and I had been down to you for a week-end to Kilverstone. You had persuaded us not to go up by the early train on the Monday, and you took us to the rose-garden, where there was a sundial with a charming and interesting inscription. You linked one arm through my wife’s and the other through mine, and walked us round and round the paths, and it was walking thus that you made the extraordinary prophecy-- “_The War will come in 1914, and Jellicoe will command the Grand Fleet._”