WITH the present Number of the Life- Boat Journal we present our readers with a Wreck Chart of the British Isles, showing all the casualties to shipping which occurred in the seas and on the shores of the United Kingdom in the year 1852, amounting to the fearful number of 1,115 wrecks. Hitherto it has been our practice to insert in each Number of the Journal a printed register of 60 or 120 wrecks, but the casualties of that year have been so great, that we find it would require 16 pages of letter-press, in small type, to overtake the arrears that crowd on us; it was thought therefore that it would be more advisable, and more acceptable to our readers in general, to abandon the register, and to present in one view, by means of a Wreck Chart, the whole of the fearful evil at a glance; the more especially so as a Wreck Register is now compiled at the Admiralty, and annually presented to Parliament, which any person can consult who wishes for further details, and it is from the Chart accompanying that publication that the present Wreck Chart •has, by permission, been reduced.

Reader, may we ask you to pause a moment, and cast a careful look at the Chart. Each black dot in the sable border which surrounds the shores, signifies a wreck, in 533 cases a total wreck, and in all other cases, such an amount of damage as to require the vessel to discharge her cargo to repair. The number of lives lost, as far as ascertained, although, doubtless, many are not recorded, is 920. Reflect for a moment, on the vast amount of misery that this loss of life must entail on surviving relatives and friends, bereaved by this fearful visitation, independently of the loss of life to the unfortunate sufferers themselves, and ask yourself the question, " Have I not the power to prevent, to some extent, the recurrence of similar distress ?" Gladly as we would enlist the sympathies of all in the cause we advocate, we do not wish to excite a passing feeling in the tender-hearted; but by a simple relation of facts and figures, to appeal to the sense of duty in our countrymen, and especially to the wealthy merchants of this vast metropolis, and of the large cities of Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, York, and Leeds, happily removed as they are by locality from the pain of being eye-witnesses of these scenes of distress, and ask them to aid us, with their purse and with their prayers, in the sacred cause in which we are engaged, of the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck.