HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

171

ships with timber from which the bark had been stripped in the spring precedingthe time of its being felled. The Sovereign of the Seas, the celebrated ship *, thebuilding of which commenced by order of King Charles the Firfl, anno 1685,and was finished in the course of the two succeeding years, is supposed, by Mr.Secretary Pepys, to have been built of timber so prepared. In the reign of Jamesthe Second, special application was made, at the instance of the sovereign him-self, to Dr. Plott, an eminent naturalist then living, who having transmitted hisopinion on that interesting subject to the king, an order was, in consequence,immediately issued for the experiment to be made on one hundred and fifty trees,which it was commanded should be immediately peeled in Bushey Park, forthe sole purpose of ascertaining the fact in question.

The letters, and other official papers on this subject, are to be found in the Ap-pendix to the Report made by the Commissioners of the Land Revenue in 1792:they are now preserved in the Navy Office, and are dated in 1687. The succeed-ing Revolution in all probability prevented the immediate pursuit of the experimentin question, which no material attempt has been made to repeat, or revive sincethat time. The extraordinary variation which has frequently occurred in respectto the time that vessels have remained fit for actual service, has been imputed,by various ingenious and scientific persons who have industriously applied them-selves to the consideration of the subject, to the difference in the quality ot thetimber itself, and the climate which produced it. It is a striking, but well-knownfact, that oak, the growth of other countries, though lying under precisely the samelatitude with Britain, has been invariably found less serviceable, in a degree al-most incredible, than that of the latter, as though nature itself, if it were possibleto indulge so romantic an idea, had forbad that the national character of a Britishship should be suffered to undergo a species of degradation by being built of mate-rials which were indigenous to it. The cause, however, of this inferior qualityhas been seriously, and, in all probability, very briefly accounted for, andthat the reasons assigned are true, may well be reconciled to human belief.Though it were needless and irrelevant, perhaps, in this place, to enter into anyenlarged statement of the learned opinions which have been promulgated on thissubject, yet it cannot but be proper, briefly to observe, that as the durability oftimber is supposed, in a very strong degree, to be occasioned by the free circula-

# Which continued in condition for the most active service during half a century, and was at lastaccidentally burnt.

tion