And we should be less proud of our country if it were not so; indeed we are almost inclined to think it a matter of necessity that in our island home, where the history of our country is so interwoven with the triumphs of our sailors, either in contests with our enemies, in pursuit of discovery, or in the development of commerce, that our sympathies with our sailors should indeed be deep and practical, and that while we rejoice in the safety and the comfort afforded by their labours, that we shall ever be prepared to help them in the hour of their distress; and that there can be therefore little room for wonder that those who realize the enormous traffic that is carried on around our shores, the dangerous nature of our coasts, and the constant casualties that are occurring, should earnestly desire the welfare of the life-boat cause, and be ready to labour for its development. The history of the life-boat movement, and of the foundation and gradual development of the Life-boat Institution, are given in the earlier pages of this book. The present condition of the Society tells abundantly of the success it has enjoyed, and of the sympathy it has gained, until now it is able almost to girdle our land with life-boat stations. Every year there is published by the Board of Trade, a register of the number of wrecks that have taken place in the British Isles during the previous year; the Life-boat Institution publishes a wreck-chart compiled from these returns; each wreck is denoted by a black dot which marks on the map the place at which the wreck occurred; and a truly dismal appearance the map has. See how plentifully these black dots are sprinkled round the coast-line, here one, and there two, at other places half-a-dozen side by side, or growing in number to ten or twelve, and then increasing still more rapidly at the more exposed parts of the coast, or where dangerous sands are more directly in the highway of vessels, so that in such places there may be found twenty, thirty, or forty such marks, and at some localities even more than these, as at the Sands off Yarmouth, the Goodwin Sands, the Bristol Channel, and others, where line after line is required to find room for the number of wrecks to be thus recorded. For the past year no fewer than 1958 such marks are necessary to complete the dismal list, for such was the number of the wrecks that took place, within that time, in the seas that surround the British Isles. The months of November and December were especially fatal, heavy gales, thick weather, shifting winds, worked terrible havoc among the shipping; the coasts were strewn with wrecks; and the wreck-chart grew proportionally darker in its outline; and is it not a terrible picture that it presents, as we recognise that almost every mark speaks of a dismal scene of destruction and of peril, of ships with wild seas breaking ruthlessly over them, and of men clinging on, being,