The French ironclad Le Roche' has just given the world
an object-lesson in the use of the ram. On the 7th inst., the French squadron at Marseilles was exercising, and the iron- clad was crossing the roadstead at full speed, when it struck the mail-steamer Marechal Canrobert' (1,200 tons), then coming in from Italy, bitting her fair and full. The shock was tremendous, and the Captain of the ironclad, foreseeing the consequences, ordered the steamer to be scoured to his own vessel, and the passengers transferred. The fastening hawsers were then cut., twelve minutes after the collision, and the steamer instantly sank, the blow having cut her nearly in two. The ironclad remained uninjured. No weight of fire could have secured such rapidity or such completeness of destruction ; nor would any strength in the steamer have preserved her from the consequences of the shock. It is by ramming that the first battles of the future will be decided, with this consequence, among others, that the mortality in a sea-fight will exceed all precedent. In the old sea-fights, a ship rarely lost a third of her crew, including killed and wounded ; but the iron ship which goes down under the blow of a modern man-of-war, will drown everybody on board,
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