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HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

gressive, though slow augmentation; so that after every vessel, considered as unfitlor actual service, had been dismantled and broken up at the conclusion of thepeace, the British navy, on the demise of queen Ann, actually reached thesame number, within four, to which it had amounted at the licur of her acces-sion, when every ship that was ailoat, however desperate her condition might be,was taken into the account.

On the score of actual improvement, very little progress appears to have beenmade in the science itself. The minds of artificers, and of those ingenious menfrom whose theoretical observations it might have derived benefit, appear to havebeen too much occupied by surrounding events, and the contest in which theircountry was engaged, to permit their minds to diverge sufficiently from the merepractical and manual operation so far as to indulge any speculative opinion foundedon study. Ships of the first rate appear to have been somewhat disregarded, and itwas a favourite maxim, extremely prevalent at that time, that they were capableof rendering little service in proportion to their magnitude, and to the expence ofequipment; except in some formidable attack on a fortress against which, owing tothe superior number of the guns mounted on-board them, in comparison with anyvessel of inferior rates, the tremendous weight of their fire must inevitably proveeffectual, and all-powerful. In respect to the vessels of the less weighty classes, thesame conviction appears to have prevailed, that the art had reached the utmostsummit of supposed perfection. The dimensions of the ships then built were stillextremely contracted ; and from the peculiarity of their form several were totallyunfit for a variety of those dangerous services which, though then thought un-adviseable, or impossible for them to undertake, a subsequent alteration hasrendered them fully competent to. It continued the fashion of the time, to attributeevery superior faculty of sailing to the mere length of the vessel itself, without any,or at least very trivial, regard to the form or shape of the bottom ; from this cir-cumstance, the wishes of the architect were rarely answered ; and whenever theyhappened to be so, the success, in all probability, was more attributable to a coin-cidence of blunders innocently committed, so that the effect of one mistake wascounteracted by another, than to any regular and established system resultingfrom theoretical knowledge and studious application. To sum up the characterof the English vessels of this period, in general terms, they were crank, confined,very indifferently adapted to the purposes of keeping the sea in tempestuousweather, and in general but sorry sailers, even when it was most favourable. To thesuperior practice of the French naval architects, be it in justice remembered to

their