The talent for commanding a fleet is by no means rare: the most successful in that line may attain fortune, the peerage, and a large pension. The talent for investigating the laws regulating the forms of ships, is of the very rarest order. Even if its possessor should happen to be of the naval profession, his greatest reward could only extend to knighthood, and a thousand a-year during the tenure of an office of great labour. Of course, naval men having the requisite talents, would never turn them into so unprofitable a direction: yet it would be difficult to say how many millions of money have been, and continue to be, uselessly expended for want of that knowledge. Amongst those situations in the appointment of the government, there are many in which a knowledge of various branches of science is highly useful. A considerable number of these are filled by officers of engineers, artillery, and other corps of the army and of the navy. Thus those whose service is already paid for by the country, are excused from doing their ordinary duty, and are paid again for doing another and perhaps a more agreeable duty. Under the delusive plea that _military_ and _civil_ engineering are the same science, military engineers have been placed in situations for which they were unfit, and civil engineers have been excluded, to the injury of that profession, and to the much greater damage of the country. The Ordnance Magnetical Observatories will furnish an example of the _economy_ which, it is pretended, results from such arrangements. Some ten or twelve years ago, it was proposed by Humboldt that various governments should establish magnetical observatories at different points on the earth’s surface, so chosen that by the united information thus obtained, we might arrive at more accurate and correct ideas of the state of the earth’s magnetism. That plan has been pursued with great advantage to science. A magnetical observatory was built at Greenwich, and continuous observations were made which have been reduced and published annually under the direction of the Astronomer Royal. The expense[23] of the Magnetic and Meteoric Observatory, excluding that portion of the Astronomer Royal’s salary which may be considered due to his services in the direction of this department, but _including the whole of the making and recording the observations themselves_, is 720_l._ annually. There are other magnetical observatories in several of our colonies in which observations are made. These observations appear to be sent for reduction to an establishment at Woolwich, under the superintendence of Colonel Sabine. Now the first and most obvious course would have been to have employed an additional number of computers at Greenwich, who should use the same formulæ and methods of reduction. This would ensure perfect uniformity, and would apparently be the most economical plan.