28 farmers' and mechanics' journal. 



OBSERVATIONS ON TUF. STATE OF NAVAL CONSTRUCTION 



IN ENGLAND. 



It appears that there is at present a tendency to improvement ii> 

 every branch of science ; monopoly in intellect may now be said 

 to be vanishing ; and empiricism is obliged to seek dark corners, 

 to escape the light which is penetrating into regions from which 

 it had but very lately been excluded. The administration, too, 

 encourages advance of knowledge ; yet notwithstanding these fa- 

 vorable circumstances, there still exists, in some minds, an inapti- 

 tude of scientific perception, which induces unwillingness to ac- 

 knowledge the advantage that results from the application of the 

 exact sciences to the useful arts. 



This neglect of scientific principles is nowhere more manifest 

 than in the affairs of Naval Architecture, and it is not confined to 

 the Royal Navy, but extends also to our mercantile shipping ; and 

 hence it is that our commercial marine is in some respects behind 

 foreign nations, especially the Americans, in the formation of its 

 ships ; our merchantmen are, almost without exception, the most 

 unsafe and slowest ships in the world. The ship-owners, there- 

 fore, would do well to consider this circumstance, and endeavor to 

 devise means of introducing science into the merchant yards. — 

 The establishment of ihe new University in the metropolis, affords 

 an opportunity of doing it at a comparatively small expense, by the 

 foundation of Lectures on the theory of Naval Architecture ; and 

 the support even of a separate institution in the vicinity of the mer- 

 chant yards of this great port, for the education of ship surveyors, 

 would soon be repaid by the improved character of our merchant 

 shipping. 



If the science of Naval Architecture depends on certain physico- 

 mathematical laws, as no doubt it does, it is monstrous to imagine 

 for a moment, that such laws can be developed by a flight of fancy, 

 or that a man is born with an intuitive optical perception of the 

 lines of least resistance, (Stc, or, in the jargon of the craniologists, 

 that he has a naval-architectural bump on his skull ; yet one would 

 think that such was the case, when we see men, we cannot say 

 philosophers, start up and loudly assert that they are in possession 

 of the secret of construction : and they are believed, because their 

 hypotheses are never submitted to the examination of those who 

 are capable of detecting their fallacy. 



The Exj^erimental S()uadrons have, with a multitude of perplex- 

 ing results, elicited, it must be confessed, at least an interesting 

 fact, viz : that there has been an establishment seventeen years in 

 this country, in Portsmouth dock-yard, for the scientific education 

 of naval architects, for the Royal Navy. From the plan of educa- 

 tion, as laid down by the Commissioners of Naval Revision in 

 1810, it appears that, to a requisite knowledge of the practice of 

 their profession, the gentlemen composing this body of naval con- 

 structors, unite a sound and competent one of its theory. 



It can only he from such a source that we can look for the im- 

 provement of our men of war, and it is to be regretted that every 



