The course of the coal from the hold of the collier to where, on the fire-bars, its potential energy is transformed into kinetic power to furnish power for a battleship is an interesting one, though I should not care to follow it quite so closely as did the ring of an officer I met not long ago. Emerging from the hold of a collier after a couple of hours spent there directing sack-filling, he missed a large signet-ring which he had been wearing when he descended into the dusty hole. Search was, of course, out of the question; but, by a lucky chance, he happened to mention his loss to one of the men who had been working in the hold. He, in turn, spoke of it in the mess-decks, which was the only reason that led the stoker, who, three days later at sea, found a shining lump of metal among the clinkers he was raking out to dump, to bring it to the officer in question. The gnarled, ash-pitted lump bore no resemblance to a ring; but a distorted, but still recognisable, section of the seal identified it beyond a doubt. It had been shovelled into a sack of coal, hoisted in the latter to the deck, dumped into a chute, finally to work out of the bottom of a bunker into the stokehold and be thrown under the boilers. A man can make the descent from the deck through an empty bunker to the stokehold without great discomfort, but would hardly survive being shut up in the former for long with the coal. The speedy coaling of even an eight-knot tramp is almost always desirable; with a warship it may often mean the difference between success and failure. All of the principal navies of the world have given the matter much study and experiment, but down to this day no practicable contrivance has been evolved which will go far toward eliminating the variable human element in coaling. Something can be done with mechanical carriers where a ship can berth alongside high bunkers, but nothing of the kind appears to have been devised that is not too bulky to carry about in either a warship or a collier. The construction of a warship makes it impracticable to have large openings into which coal might be hoisted in bulk from a collier. The American Navy coals its battleships by hoisting that fuel to the decks with huge mechanical "grabs," but, according to such information as is available to me at this moment, this method (while effecting a saving in labour), does not approach for speed records the British have put up by man-handling the coal at every stage of its transit, except the hoisting.