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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVIII. No. 728 



and little depended upon science. With 

 improvements in weapons, warfare becomes 

 more and more a matter of exact science 

 and the military man becomes more and 

 more a civil and mechanical engineer. In 

 the military land operations of the future, 

 science will more than ever be supreme 

 above mere brute force. 



Nothing is more apparent than a simple 

 proposition after it has been well learned. 

 To hitch up a steam engine to propeller 

 wheels and drive a boat looks simple 

 enough to us all now, but when Fulton 

 proposed a steamboat voyage up the Hud- 

 son, the undertaking appeared about as in- 

 credible to most people of the time as a 

 suggested voyage to Mars would now be. 



The old wooden hulk was in its day a 

 dare-devil innovation. He was a revolu- 

 tionist, in the inventive sense, who first fired 

 heavy guns from a ship's deck. The pres- 

 ent battleship is only a highly developed 

 Monitor, just as the old wooden sailing 

 ship was a highly developed trireme. 



It is the same conservative spirit to-day 

 that believes in the battleship as the final 

 arbiter of national supremacy that once 

 believed in the old wooden-sides and ad- 

 hered to them, opposing all innovations; 

 the same spirit of conservatism that ad- 

 hered to the Roman galley and placed its 

 faith in the crew of the galley slaves rather 

 than upon the uncertain wind; the same 

 conservatism that made the Carthaginians 

 adhere to their outclassed triremes; and, 

 in inverse order, it is the same spirit of 

 invention combating entrenched conserva- 

 tism that led the Romans to build their 

 galleys for close-order work, armed with 

 grappling hooks, with which they secured 

 their vessels to the Carthaginian triremes, 

 where the Roman short sword could be 

 brought into play. 



When, in the first Punic war, the primi- 

 tive Roman fleet met and was vanquished 



by the Carthaginians, the order of battle 

 was the same as it is to-day. The vessels 

 lined up at such a distance apart as would 

 enable the Carthaginians to strike the 

 Romans with their long-range arrows and 

 the stones hurled by their Balearic slingers. 

 When, however, the Romans devised a 

 means whereby they were able to run them 

 down and grapple with them in hand- 

 to-hand conflict, victory was with the 

 Romans. 



The next great improvement in naval 

 warfare will be on the lines of ways and 

 means of repeating what the Romans did — 

 ways and means of charging upon and 

 grappling with the mighty war-vessels of 

 an enemy, to sink them with the short 

 sword of high explosives. 



There is no one thing so much needed 

 in naval warfare at the present time as a 

 more efficient means of reaching battle- 

 ships and cruisers with a sufficient quantity 

 of high explosives for their destruction; 

 in other words, there is a more imperative 

 demand for improvements in torpedoes and 

 torpedo-boats than in any other branch of 

 the naval service. 



The effective range of the modem high- 

 power gun is now about five miles, and it 

 is the range of the guns that determines 

 the distance between the lines of battle of 

 modern fleets; and the fleet with guns of 

 the longest range has the opposing fleet at 

 its mercy. 



A little while ago the Whitehead auto- 

 mobile torpedo was thought to be a valu- 

 able adjunct to the armament of the modern 

 battleship, but the range of the guns has 

 now been so increased that such torpedoes 

 become a useless incumbrance, because of 

 the shortness of their range, notwithstand- 

 ing the fact that their manufacturers have 

 done everything possible to perfect them 

 and to increase their speed and range. 

 Their range is necessarily limited to that 



