I wish particularly to impress this upon you: the subject has occupied long, frequent, and serious deliberations. I have come to the conclusion which you will no doubt readily acquiesce in, that our first practical mechanical success, upon which so much of our financial success hangs (although others might reap the benefit even of our failure in the first instance), will depend mainly upon the skilful management in our earliest voyages of the machine we are about to set afloat; but I have also come to the conclusion, the correctness of which may not be so immediately apparent to you, that this machine, though nominally a ship, not only admits of, but requires, a totally different management from that which may have successfully navigated ordinary ships, and that most of the habits, feelings, and sensations, amounting to instinct, possessed by a good sailor, and the peculiar power of skilful adaptation of expedients to emergencies, which constitute the merits of a first-rate sailor, have to be put aside for a time rather than applied in the first instance to make a successful commander of the vessel. In navigating a small vessel, a man has to study the appearance of the weather, the direction of the wind, and that of the seas; to consider the probabilities of change; to vary his course more or less with reference to any of these causes, and according not only to the then state of all these operating causes, but also with reference to the probabilities of change; and with their consideration his mind is principally occupied, and it is in the exercise of judgment and foresight in these points that he shows his skill. Steam navigation, and the gradual increase in the size of vessels, have no doubt materially modified this, but much still remains to occupy the mind of the commander of a steamer, with which not only we shall have nothing to do, but too much attention to which, from previous habits, would divert his attention from that which, under the different circumstances, will become much more important. In the same manner, in manœuvring such a vessel in harbour, the ordinary modes would be totally inapplicable; whereas, by entirely discarding all previous practices, and keeping in his mind and making use of the peculiar powers which are at command in this vessel, and judiciously attending to the immense effect of the _vis inertiæ_, or momentum of such a mass, so far beyond that of anything now afloat that it becomes a totally _new_ influence, this machine may be managed by a skilful man with a facility which is not attainable with small craft; while such a mass would be destruction to itself or to anything that comes in contact with it, if treated at all in the same manner as even the largest steamers are now handled.