bmarine and the dread of its victims. The technical difficulties
connected with the release and aiming of the torpedo have been met and
conquered, so that these craft, though they played no considerable part
in the war, were brought by the pressure of war, which quickens all
things, to the stage of practical efficiency.

Some minor causes of the delay in the development of torpedo aircraft
may perhaps be found. Those who pinned their faith to the Dreadnought as
the mainstay of naval power were not likely to be eager to improve a
weapon which, more than any other, seemed likely to make the Dreadnought
belie its name. Moreover, the burden of a torpedo was never very popular
with pilots. A torpedo can be used only against its preordained target;
it gives no protection to the aircraft that carries it, and its great
weight makes the machine slower in manoeuvre and more vulnerable. This
objection was well stated by a German pilot who was taken prisoner in
June 1917. The Germans, in the early part of that year, formed at
Zeebrugge a flight of torpedo seaplanes, which had this advantage over
our torpedo aircraft, that suitable targets were not lacking. These
seaplanes sank three of our merchant ships in the vicinity of Margate
and the Downs. Two of the seaplanes were shot down on the morning of
the 11th of June 1917 by the armed yacht _Diana_. In the report of the
examination of the German pilots it is told that both the prisoners
seemed to deprecate this mode of flying, and to glory chiefly in their
own single-seaters, which were smaller, swifter, and without
encumbrance. 'Once you are given a two-seater,' said one of them, 'the
authorities start loading you up with cameras, machine-guns, bombs, and
wireless, and now, to crown all, they actually hang a torpedo on your
machine!'

The new types of naval aircraft which were invented or developed during
the course of the war have now been briefly described. When a critical
account shall hereafter be rendered of the doings of the years 1914 to
1918, regarded as an incident in the ever-lengthening history of human
warfare upon earth, these new departures in the use of naval aircraft
will probably be recognized as the chief contribution to sea-power made
by the late war. Their importance is enormous, but their place in the
actual history of the earlier years of the war is comparatively small.
The weapons of the Royal Naval Air Service, so far as purely naval uses
were concerned, wer