carrying 4½-inch armour of home manufacture; the steam line-of-battle ship _Kaiser_, four steam frigates, and some smaller boats. These were practically ready for sea when hostilities were commenced. The two unfinished ironclads _Habsburg_ and _Ferdinand Maximilian_ were got ready in an improvised fashion and given smooth-bore guns; and the _Don Juan_, another vessel in a state of even greater unpreparedness, had the deficiencies in her armour made good with heavy wooden beams. The Italians had two hundred and seventy-six rifled cannon to one hundred and twenty-one on the Austrian ships. The Austrian Admiral, Tegethoff, was a man who left nothing to chance. He knew what he had to do, and he had that genius for command which enables a man to do his best with the materials at his disposal. Great though he knew the discrepancy to be between his own fleet and that of the Italians, it is a remarkable testimony to his organising power that he was able at the first glimpse he had of the Italian fleet to understand the extraordinary lack of cohesion that characterised it from first to last, and to prepare to meet it with every expectation of victory. He placed his fleet in wedge formation with the intention of breaking the enemy’s line of ironclads with his own ironclads, so as to avoid subjecting his weaker vessels to the fire of the heavier Italian vessels, as might have been done had he attacked the Italian line near or beyond its centre. He also intended to ram the Italian ships whenever he had a chance, but though the chances later were numerous, the ram proved a less effective weapon than had been expected. The duty of the Austrian smaller vessels was to rake with their guns the Italian ships after the heavier Austrian ships should have thrown them into confusion, for owing to the longer range of the Italian guns and the heavier weight of their projectiles, the Italians had a superiority at long-range fighting which the Austrian commander was by no means disposed to allow them to turn to their advantage.