There is another final training-school at Mare Island, Cal. The navy
supplies the operators for the rapidly increasing number of war vessels,
and has undertaken to supply radio operators for all merchant vessels in
transatlantic service.

At Harvard and Mare Island the radio students are put through four
months' courses, which embraces not only radio-telegraphy and allied
subjects, but military training. Some 500,000 men have been undergoing
courses at these two schools alone.

When war occurred the Coast Guard was transferred from the Treasury
Department to the Navy Department, and the personnel now consists of 227
officers and 4,683 warrant officers and enlisted men.

In the work of examining and considering the great volume of ideas and
devices and inventions submitted from the public, the Naval Consulting
Board has rendered a signal service. Beginning March, 1917, the Navy
Department was overwhelmed with correspondence so great that it was
almost impossible to sort it. Letters, plans, and models were received
at the rate of from 5 to 700 a day. Within a year upward of 60,000
letters, many including detailed plans, some accompanied by models, have
been examined and acted upon. To do this work a greatly enlarged office
force in the Navy Department was necessary, and offices were established
in New York and San Francisco. While a comparatively small number of
inventions have been adopted--some of them of considerable value--the
majority has fallen into the class of having been already known, and
either put into use or discarded after practical test.

And thus the Navy Department is carrying on its share of the war, a
share significant at the very outset as one of our most important