492 
Cherbourg ; seven hours’ steaming at the rate of six miles an hour 
will bring them together. A single glance at the heavy and 
well-appointed tiers of a line-of-battle ship’s guns will satisfy 
any one that they are no toys to be placed in the hands of 
novices. Formidable batteries of the heaviest ordnance are 
there—not a gun under a 32-pounder, and many 68-pounder 
shell guns.” In little more than a quarter of a century engineers 
have changed all that, and advanced to 20-knot vessels and 120- 
ton guns. Archeologists tell us that our predecessors in 
mechanical science of the Stone Age were apparently a thous- 
and or more years in finding out that the best way of fitting an 
axe was to slip the handle through the axe and not the axe 
through the handle. Engineers of the present day may be ex- 
cused, therefore, for occasionally illustrating the rapidity of the 
advance of their science by contrasting the ships of thirty years 
ago with our modern ironclads. 
The latest type of battle-ship weighs, fully equipped, about 
10,000 tons. There are about 3400 tons of steel in her hull, 
apart from armour, which, with its backing, will weigh a further 
2800 tons. The machinery, largely of steel, is about 1400 tons ; 
the armament, including ammunition, 1100 tons ; the coals, 1100 
tons ; and general equipment, 270 tons. A detailed description 
bristles with the word ‘‘steel,” and enthusiastic newspaper re- 
porters sent down to Chatham Dockyard can no more ‘‘spin 
out their copy ” with Cowper’s oft-quoted lines on the ‘* Launch 
of a First-Rate” :— 
‘Giant oaks of bold expansion 
O’er seven hundred acres fell, 
All to build thy noble mansion, 
Where our hearts of oak do dwell.” 
A latter-day poet might boast of 700 acres being exhausted by a 
single vessel, but it would be a coal-field and not a forest. Ac- 
cepting Prof. Phillips’s estimate of the average rate of formation 
of coal, it may be shown that a hard-worked American liner 
during her lifetime burns as much coal as would be produced on 
the area of 700 acres in a period of 2000 years. Weare thus 
with our steel ships using up our primeval forests at a far more 
extravagant rate than that at which our immediate forefathers 
cleared the oak forests. Coal is the great stimulant of the 
modern engineer. Pope Pius the Second has left on record an 
expression of the astonishment he felt when visiting Scotland, in 
the fifteenth century, on seeing poor people in rags begging at 
church doors, and receiving for alms pieces of black stone, with 
which they went away contented. To such early familiarity 
with coal may, however, be due the fact that Scotland has ever 
led the way in the development of the-steam-engine, and that at 
the date of the battle of Waterloo she had built and registered 
seven steam-vessels, whilst England could boast of none. 
Probably none but a poet or a painter would wish for a return 
to our old oak sailing ships. Some few people still entertain the 
illusion that the picturesque old tubs were better sea-boats than 
our razor-ended steamers; but, speaking of them in 1846, 
Admiral Napier said: “The ships look very charming in 
harbour, but to judge of them properly you should see them in a 
gale of wind, when it would be found they would roll 45° lee- 
ward and 43° windward.” Even our first ironclads were not so 
bad as that, for although, according to the Zzmes, when the 
squadron was on trial in the Bay of Biscay, the ships rocked 
wildly to the rising swell and the sea broke in great hills of surf, 
yet the maximum roll signalled by the worst roller of the lot— 
the Lord Warden—was but 35° leeward and 27° windward 
—a total range of 62° as compared with 88° in the old line-of- 
battle ships. 
We have heard much about the state of the navy during the past 
twelve months. A dip into the publications of the British Asso- 
ciation—which in this, as in other respects, afford a fair indica- 
tion of what is uppermost in people’s minds—will show that 
similar discussions have recurred periodically, at any rate since 
1830. If we consult Hansard, as I had occasion to do recently, 
we find the same remark applies to periods long antecedent to 
1830. 
It amounts almost to a religious conviction in the mind of a 
Briton that Providence will not be on his side unless his fleet is 
at least equal to that of France and Russia united, What 
would be said now of a Minister who met an attack on the 
administration of the navy by demonstrating that we had alf 
as many line-of-battle ships as Russia : and yet that was literally 
done less than fifty years ago. Speaking in the House of Com- 
mons on March 4, 1839, the Secretary of the Admiralty said: 
NALURE 
[ Sept. 17, 1885 
‘“For the last six months unceasing attacks have been made 
upon our naval administration, describing our navy as in a state 
of the utmost decrepitude, and Tory papers say that shameful 
reductions have been made in the navy by the present Govern- 
ment. It will be a consolation to my honourable friends to be 
assured that we have for years lived unharmed through dangers 
as great as that to which we are now exposed. In 1817 we had 15 
sail-of-the-line in commission, and Russia had 30; in 1823 we 
had 12, and Russia 37 ; in 1832 we had rr, and Russia 36; and 
now we have 20, and the Russians 43, having raised our ships 
to nearly half the number of those of Russia. 
Now as to our guns. The past twelve months is by no means 
the first occasion on which the armament of our navy has been 
attacked. Three years subsequent to the speech of the Secre- 
tary of the Admiralty just referred to, Sir Charles Napier made 
a statement from his place in Parliament of so extraordinary a 
character that I make no apology for quoting his exact words, as 
a reminder of the past and a warning for the future: ‘‘ At the 
end of the last war the guns were in such a bad state that, when 
fired, they would scarcely hit an enemy, and during the latter 
period of the American war a secret order was issued that 
British ships of war should not engage American frigates, be- 
cause the former were in such an inefficient state.” As for him- 
self, said the plain-spoken old admiral, when he got the order 
he put it in ‘‘the only place fit to receive it, the quarter- 
galley.”’ 
Happily, from our insular position, the change which the pro- 
gress of mechanical science has wrought in military operations has 
not been brought home to the people of this country in the same 
vivid manner that it has to the people of the continents of 
Europe and America. In the American war, the Franco-Ger- 
man war, and the Russo-Turkish war the construction and 
equipment of railway works by engineers was an essential part 
of all great movements. The Russians, in 1877, constructed a 
railway from Bender to Galatz, 180 miles in length, in fifty-eight 
working days, or at the rate or more than three miles per day. 
Altogether, in the three latter months of that year they laid out 
and built about 240 miles of railway, and purchased and stocked 
the line with 110 locomotives and 2200 waggons. ‘They also 
built numerous trestle bridges, together with an opening bridge 
and a ferry across the Danube. 
We have had recent experience of the slowness of primitive 
modes of transport in the tedious advance of Lord Wolseley’s 
handful of men in whale-boats up the Nile. It was the inten- 
tion of the late Khedive, partly from military and partly from 
commercial considerations, to construct a railway exactly on the 
line of arlvance subsequently followed by Wolseley. My part- 
ner, Mr. Fowler, had the railway sent out in 1873, and the works 
were shortly after commenced. The total length was 550 miles, 
and the estimated cost, including rolling-stock and repairing- 
shops, 4,000,000/. Owing to financial difficulties the works were 
abandoned, but the 64 miles constructed by Mr. Fowler, and the 
recent extensions of the same by the military, proved of great 
service to the expedition, even some of the steam-launches being 
taken by railway to save delays at the cataracts. 
During the siege of Paris the German forces were dependent 
upon supplies drawn from their base, and the army requirements 
were fully met by one line of railway running twelve to fourteen 
trains per day. Military authorities state that a train load of 
about 250 tons is equal to two days’ rations and corn for an army 
corps of 37,000 men and 10,000 horses. The military opera- 
tions in Egypt have proved that, even in the heart of Africa, 
railways, steamboats, electric lights, machine guns, and other 
offspring of mechanical science, are essential ingredients of 
success. 
Members of this Section who visited the United States last 
year not for the first time could hardly have failed to notice that 
American and European engineering practice are gradually pre- 
senting fewer points of difference. Early American iron railway 
bridges were little more than the ordinary type of timber bridge 
done into iron, and the characteristic features, therefore, were 
great depth of truss, forged links, pins, screw-bolts, round or 
rectangular struts, cast-iron junction pieces, and, in brief, an 
assemblage of a number of independent members more or less 
securely bolted together, and not, as in European bridges, a 
solidly riveted mass of plates and angle-bars. At the present 
moment the typical American bridge is distinctly derived from 
the grafting of German practice on the original parent stock. 
Pin connections are still generally used in bridges of any size, 
but the top members and connections are more European than 
