THE CONQUEST OF TIME AND SPACE 



boats played no part in it whatever. There is only one 

 possible conclusion to be drawn from this: the day of 

 the submarine as a determining factor in naval battles 

 on the high seas had not arrived. 



The reason for the surprise of the generality of peo- 

 ple in finding the submarine was not as yet an entirely 

 practical war engine, is due to the enthusiastic misrep- 

 resentations of the daily press and magazines, whose 

 readers have been led to infer that the modem sub- 

 marine .boat is so far perfected that it can do things 

 under water almost as well as boats on the surface. 

 Nothing is farther from the truth. Under ideal (and 

 consequently unusual) conditions, the submarines, and 

 submersibles, have done, and can do, some remarkable 

 things, such as staying submerged for hours, diving to 

 a depth of two hundred feet, and running long dis- 

 tances. But these are only the first requisites of the 

 under- water fighting boat — simply the "creeping stage'* 

 of development. The common impression that the 

 submarine boat, such as the ones of the Holland and 

 Lake types, can go cruising about, fish-like, for hours, 

 watching for its prey in some mysterious manner with- 

 out coming near the surface, is a dream not yet realized. 



If one will pause to consider that light is necessary 

 to sight and that one hundred feet of sea water makes 

 almost as efficient an obstacle to vision as a stone wall, 

 it will be easy to understand why the submarine is still 

 struggling with difficulties that oppose its perfection. 

 The fanciful illustration seen so often of a submarine 

 diving hundreds of feet deep in the water, swimming 

 about and finally coming up under the keel of a battle 



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