HISTORY OF MARINEARC HI TECTURE.

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recent date. The description of the form which is given to the hull, bearsno mean resemblance, making the proper allowance for the differenceof circumstances, to the galley of the ancients ; and the dimensions assignedmight, in respect to its proportions, answer almost equally well for the Cartha-genian as the New Zealand galley *. The similitude between the ornamentalparts, making the same allowance that has been already claimed, is no lessobvious ; the towering height of the stern, adopted in the Southern Atlantic,in the eighteenth century, might, without any very extravagant stretch of thefancy, be deduced from the corymbus of the ancients ; while the head is per-haps a more striking representation of the head or ornament -f attached to thebows of the Roman galley, and from thence transmitted through the Venetians,and other more modern maritime powers, to the ship at this moment ingeneral use. In short, the same bent of genius appears, as it were, hereditarilycontinued through the successive generations of more than thirty centuries,till the invention of cannon rendered a more material alteration unavoidablynecessary ; though even in that, it was apparent that certain ideas had takensuch forcible hold of the human imagination, as not to be cast off but by socomplete a convulsion of the mind and nature, as should not only totally obliterateall traces of its former pursuits, but cause an inevitable engagement in suchas were of very contrary nature.

Partially dormant as most of the ideas on which the marine architecture of Romewas founded necessarily became in the fourteenth century, owing to the introductionof cannon into naval contests by the Venetians, who first used them against theGenoese in the year 1377, they are found, with no fmall degree of wonder, singularlyrevived in a most remote and obscure corner of the world, in all the venerablesplendor of uncivilized antiquity. Little, therefore, ought it to excite thesurprise of the modern navigator, that the inhabitants of Otaheite, Owhyhee,of New Zealand, and even the north-west continent of America, should havepreserved such a general similitude between their vessels, though totally desti-tute of all intercourse with each other, as might almost persuade the critical ob-server, that they were all the constructions of one and the same country, and onlyvarying, in such points as were discoverable, on account of the different uses andpurposes to which they were applied.

* See Vol. I. p. 78. f Vol. I. p. 114. Vol. I. Plate 7. p. 120.

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