r, they were but scarecrows, if even
respected as such. Of the twenty-seven steamers, only six dated from
before 1850; the remainder were being built when I entered the Naval
Academy in September, 1856. Their construction, with all that it
meant, constituted a principal part of the environment into which I
was then brought, of which the recasting of the list of officers was
the other most important and significant feature. Both were
revolutionary in character, and prophetic of further changes quite
beyond the foresight of contemporaries. From this point of view, the
period in question has the character of an epoch, initiated, made
possible, by the invention of the screw-propeller; which, in addition
to the better nautical qualities associated with it, permitted the
defence of the machinery by submersion, and of the sides of the ship
by the application of armor. In this lay the germ of the race between
the armor and the gun, involving almost directly the attempt to reach
the parts which armor cannot protect, the underwater body, by means of
the torpedo. The increases of weight induced by the competition of gun
and armor led necessarily to increase of size, which in turn lent
itself to increases of speed that have been pushed beyond the strictly
necessary, and at all events are neither militarily nor logically
involved in the progress made. It has remained to me always a matter
of interest and satisfaction that I first knew the navy, was in close
personal contact and association with it, in this period of
unconscious transition; and that to the fact of its being yet
incomplete I have owed the experience of vessels, now wholly extinct,
of which it would be no more than truth to say that in all essential
details they were familiar to the men of two hundred years ago. Nay,
in their predecessors of that date, as transmitted to us by
contemporary prints, it is easy to trace the development, in form, of
the ships I have known from the mediaeval galley; and this, were the
records equally complete, would doubtless find its rudimentary
outlines in the triremes of the ancient world. Of this evolution of
structure clear evidences remain also in terminology, even now
current; survivals which, if the facts were unknown, would provoke
curiosity and inquiry as to their origin, as physiologists seek to
reconstruct the past of a race from scanty traces still extant.

I have said that the character of the ships then building constituted
a