Catalogue description Admiralty: Foreign Intelligence Committee and Naval Intelligence Department: Naval Intelligence Reports

The reports are numbered in a single series every item of which is noted in the table of contents of the appropriate volume, but not all of which are bound up in this series. There are also some unnumbered reports included. The numbers were allocated in chronological sequence, but until about 1890 successive editions of reports on particular subjects bore the number of the earlier report on that subject with a suffix. Thus Report No. 3C, France, Mercantile Marine, was issued in 1888 between Nos. 154 and 155, and was so numbered because it replaced No. 3B of 1887 on the same subject, which in its turn had replaced No. 3A of 1885 and the original No. 3 of 1883. About 1890 this practice was abandoned and thereafter suffix letters were used only for supplements and corrigenda.