284 SECTION MECHANICS. 



ON NAVAL ARCHITECTURE, 



In nominating for the distinguished position which I occupy this 

 morning in an International Assembly, the Director of Construction of 

 a War Navy, the Committee have exposed themselves to some possible 

 objections. I can find their defence not only in my own personal 

 fraternal and kindly feelings towards our guests, but also in the general 

 aspect of war machinery to the eyes of an Englishman. He would 

 show his newest ship of war or his newest gun to his foreign guest 

 with the same sort of feeling that he would exhibit the trappings and 

 weapons of the policeman or the special constable. They are the 

 means by which he hopes to make himself the terror of evil doers, and 

 he does not reckon his guest among them. Still the Admiralty has not 

 exhibited a single model of a ship of war, nor any warlike apparatus. 

 Every modern ship of war equipped for sea is in itself a series of 

 laboratories full of scientific instruments and apparatus, but they are 

 of such a character that they could not be well transferred bodily to 

 these galleries, and it is impossible to represent them by models or 

 drawings. But, thanks to the labours of the Committee, the Exhibition 

 in this department of Marine Architecture is not without interest. 



Notwithstanding that ships and apparatus for modern naval warfare 

 are represented in such a very incomplete manner in this splendid 

 Exhibition, a state of things which, perhaps, no one much regrets, 

 I should not be justified in ignoring ships of war in an address on 

 Naval Architecture. 



There is a model in the Exhibition of some of the floating batteries 

 originated by the late Emperor, Napoleon the Third, of France, built in 

 1854-56, by Messrs. Green, of Blackwall, and there is also a model of 

 the first English seagoing ironclad, the " Warrior," designed under the 

 superintendence of Mr. Isaac Watts. 



The "Warrior" is a very remarkable ship, not because she is a 

 powerful fighting engine, for that she cannot be said to be, but because 

 in the material of construction and in the disposition of her armour, 

 she is precisely what experience has shown to be the best ; and our latest 

 designs, the " Ajax " and " Agamemnon " differing from her, as they do 

 widely, in proportions, in thickness of armour, in power of guns, in the 



