HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

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the stem, or cutwater, to the stern, including the rakes of each, sixty-five feet ;length by the keel fifty-seven; the extreme breadth, nine feet only. The dimensionsof a Quinquireme, taken from the same boasted authority, were equally ridicu-lous and repugnant to common sense : in particular, the oars of the upper tierwere seventy feet in length, and not two inches in diameter at the handle.What judgment then, or description, can we frame, relying on the same autho-rity, of those vessels which are reported to have been furnished with six, seven,eight, and so on, through the different ranks, or rates, up to thirty tiers, of oars ;what of that of Ptolemy Philopater, which is said to have been of still greater mag-nitude ? Of this ship Athenaeus gives the following wonderful, and, to modernconceptions, incredible account in his fifth book. “ It had forty ranks of oars,according to the common interpretation (Teircrx^xKovT^v v«vv ica,Te<rxeviz<rsv o <PiXo-ttcctuo) was two hundred and eighty cubits in length, equal to about four hundredand twenty English feet, thirty-eight cubits, or fifty-seven feet, in breadth, fromentrance to entrance, and nearly eighty feet in perpendicular height, from theaft rail, or tafferel, according to the modern term, to the keel. It was furnishedwith four rudders, or steering oars, forty-five feet each in length, and the longestof the oars with which it was impelled were, in length, equal to the extremebreadth of the vessel. The crew consisted of upwards of four thousand rowers,and four hundred, or, as some accounts say, three thousand other personswere employed in the different occupations of navigating so immense a floatingfabrick.”

Many objections are made by commentators and criticks to this account. If,say they, the height of the vessel was forty-eight cubits, how could an oar onlythirty-eight in length touch the water ? But this is not the most forcible argu-ment against the correctness of the above description, for we may deduct at leasthalf that height, for the part of the vessel under water, and the rise of thetafferel above the upper row-ports, so that if, according to the suggestion raisedby some, the oars were not in vessels of that magnitude obliquely extended intothe water, according to that idea or method with which we are most conversant,but were, as some have thought, used as impellers, being kept parallel to a per-pendicular, raised from the keel to the centre of the deck, and worked by a handlefixed into it at a right angle, the length of the oar becomes sufficient for the pur-pose it was intended to answer. But here again a fresh obstacle arises in theimpossibility of working those impellers with effect, except by a rotatory motion,which is, on many accounts, absurd to suppose, and even impracticable in the

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