529 
COAST DEFENCE IN DELATION TO WAD. 
The first Lecture delivered at the Malta Naval and Military Society, 28tli December, 1893> 
MAJOR SIR O. S. CLARKE, K.C.M.G., R.E. 
Majoe-Geneeal Stuaet Nicholson, R.A., in the Chaie* 
I have thought it wisest in this first paper of our new Society to avoid 
all technicalities and to address myself only to principles, in which we 
can all alike find interest. Coast Defence may be treated from many 
different points of view, and that which I propose to take is, unfortu¬ 
nately, the rarest, for various reasons. An era of peace inevitably 
tends to make us forget the teaching of war, or to believe that it has 
no real value in presence of modern discoveries. Each fresh invention, 
from a quick-firing gun to a submarine boat, is invariably announced to 
the world as capable, if we will only adopt it in sufficient quantities, of 
revolutionising warfare. Yet the great principles of warfare by sea or 
land remain unchanged and unchangeable, as far as we can judge from 
the experience of the past, and we have no right or reason to believe 
that modern science will alter them. 
Fortification perhaps suffers specially from the absence of the test of 
continuous experience, which powerfully operates in regulating the pro¬ 
gress of the civil sciences. The products of the latter are healthy 
growths ever acquiring fresh strength and conquering new realms of 
action. Their entry into the science of men and nations is determined 
by the uncompromising laws of evolution, which ruthlessly reject all 
that is worthless or chimerical and ensure the survival of the fittest. 
They are in fact subjected to the severe test of every-day require¬ 
ment, and they triumph or pass into oblivion, according to the measure 
of their practical achievement. 
The science of fortification, if it can be rightly so styled, has not to 
pass through the same ordeal, and failing the application of the one 
possible test—war—it tends inevitably to drift into the airy regions of 
mere speculation. Fixed data, unquestioned deductions from real 
experience, are generally unattainable, and the human mind, craving 
certitude, readily invests its individual promptings with the sanctions of 
authority. Thus the very triumphs of scientific progress involve danger 
to fortification, since by an easy process of thought they appear to be 
universally applicable to the strange and special needs of war. The 
inventor, fired with the enthusiasm which is his necessary attribute, 
rarely grasps conditions which fall wholly outside of his experience, and 
reason shows pale in the dazzling light of the prestige justly attaching 
11. VOL. XXI. 70 
