Admiral of the fleet, per day, £6; admiral, £5; vice-admiral, £4; rear-admiral, £3. An admiral commanding-in-chief receives £3 a day additional at home and £4 10s. abroad, as table money. In 1901 there were seventy-three flag officers on the active list in the British Navy: viz., five admirals of the fleet, ten admirals, twenty-one vice-admirals, and thirty-seven rear-admirals; and on retired and reserved pay, two admirals of the fleet, seventy-two admirals, and one hundred and one rear-admirals. The admiral of the fleet takes rank with a field marshal, admirals with generals, vice-admirals with lieutenant-generals, and rear-admirals with major-generals.
ADMIRAL. 1. In entomology, any of several nymphalid butterflies, ordinarily the “red” admiral (Pyrameis atalanta), common throughout North America, Europe, northern Asia, and Africa. It has an expanse of about 2½ inches, and is brown, the hinder wings broadly margined with red, including a row of four dark dots; the same color forms a curved diagonal band across the fore wings, beyond which the angle of the wing is spotted with white and edged with purple. (See Plate of American Butterflies.) The caterpillar is 1⅛ inches long, brown and spinous; the chrysalis is brown, naked, and suspended to the food-plant upon which the larva has fed, usually some species of nettle, hop, or related plant. Butterflies of the related genus Basilarchia are called white admirals.
2. In conchology, a cone (Conus ammiralis) whose shell was formerly rare and valuable.
ADMIRALTY, The. In England, the state department which exercises the administrative functions of the lord high admiral, and which, accordingly, has the management of all matters concerning the British Navy and the royal marines. These functions of the lord high admiral have been transferred to and vested in a board of commissioners. (See Admiral.) The constitution and functions of this body will now be described.
The board of admiralty, as at present constituted, comprises five lords commissioners of the admiralty, who decide collectively on all important questions. Besides this collective or corporate action, each commissioner has special duties assigned to him. There are two civil or political lords, and three naval or sea lords. The first lord, who is always a cabinet minister, besides a general control, has the management of naval estimates, finance, political affairs, slave-trade prevention, appointments, and promotions. The first naval lord manages the composition and distribution of the fleet, naval discipline, appointment of inferior officers, commissioning ships, general instructions, sailing orders, and the naval reserve. The second naval lord attends to armaments, manning the navy, the coast-guard, the marines, marine artillery, and naval apprentices. The third naval lord has control over the purchase and disposal of stores, victualing ships, navy medical affairs, transports, convicts, and pensioners. The junior civil lord attends to accounts, mail-packets, Greenwich hospital, naval chaplains, and schools. Naval architecture, the building and repairing of ships, steam machinery, and new inventions are superintended by the Comptroller of the Navy, who is not a member of the board, but is directly responsible to the first lord. Under the lords are the first secretary (parliamentary), the second secretary (permanent), and the naval secretary (professional), who manage the daily office work. The lords all resign when the prime minister resigns, and those who have seats in Parliament are replaced by others.
ADMIRALTY INLET. The central and main passage of Puget Sound (q.v.), forming in its southern part the eastern branch of the arm of the sea which here penetrates the State of Washington. The width varies from one to ten miles, and the channel is obstructed by relatively few islands. The coast line is marked by a succession of projecting points of land and receding minor inlets, which render the form as a whole exceedingly irregular. Seattle, Tacoma, and Port Townsend are the chief cities on the Inlet. The channel has usually a depth of several hundred feet, and thus offers valuable facilities for transportation.
ADMIRALTY IS′LAND (Map: Alaska, J 4). An island about 80 miles long, well wooded and watered, included in Alaska (q.v.).
ADMIRALTY ISLANDS. A group of about 40 islands, constituting a part of the Bismarck Archipelago (q.v.), lying to the northeast of New Guinea, between 2° and 3° S. lat. and 146° 18′ and 147° 46′ E. long. (Map: East India Islands, L 5). The largest is about 50 miles long from east to west, and is covered with rich vegetation. They abound in cocoanut trees and are inhabited by savages. They were discovered by the Dutch in 1616 and became a German protectorate in 1885.
ADMIRALTY LAW. The system of law and procedure relating to maritime transactions. It owes its name to the fact that originally it was administered in England by the lord high admiral. Not only its rules of substantive law but its procedure were adopted from the civil law, and from such sea codes as those of Rhodes (q.v.) and Oléron (q.v.). This fact, and its adaptability to new causes of action, which led suitors to resort to the admiralty rather than to the common law courts, aroused the hostility of the common law bench and bar. The contest between the partisans of the two systems which followed resulted in contracting the jurisdiction of English admiralty courts to very narrow limits. Modern statutes have extended it, and have also made the Court of Admiralty a part of the Supreme Court of Judicature, forming it, with the courts of probate and divorce, into the probate, divorce, and admiralty divisions. At present the ordinary jurisdiction of English admiralty courts embraces actions to recover possession of a ship, to recover damages for injuries to shipping, to recover seamen's wages, for salvage, for necessaries supplied to a ship, for bottomry, respondentia (q.v.), and mortgage, for pilotage and towage, for restoration of goods taken by pirates, and for assaults or batteries on the high seas.
By the United States constitution (Article III., § 2), the cognizance of “all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction” is granted to the Federal judiciary. The limits of this grant of judicial authority were in doubt for many years. On the one hand it was insisted that the admiralty jurisdiction of the Federal courts was confined to the cases cognizable by the English admiralty when our States separated from the mother country. On the other hand, it was argued that the broad language of the constitu-
