branches of their profession, and have under their immediate control officers specially selected from the service, having to do with matérial in all its varied forms. Moreover, the nature of their administrative duties is such as to keep them constantly informed regarding developments in matériel, not only of our own but in foreign services; and, finally, they bring to their exacting duties as members of a board on design large experience, definite knowledge, and conservative judgment, coupled with a sense of the crucial responsibility resting upon them for the success of the completed ships when fully equipped. The Department, therefore, relies with confidence upon the determinations of this highly competent board for the final arbitrament of technical questions relating to the matériel of the Navy.

THE CORPS OF NAVAL CONSTRUCTORS.

While appreciating the excellent work done in all branches of the naval service, I am prompted by certain recent comment with respect. to the method of preparing designs of naval vessels to emphasize my sincere appreciation of the work done by the highly trained corps of naval constructors. The officers composing this corps are chosen from the foremost members of their respective classes at the Naval Academy; they are sent to sea, and are afterwards given a specialized course of study at home or abroad. I know of no body of men better equipped by thorough preliminary training for the duties devolving upon them.

The result of this admirable technical equipment is that many of these officers have been tempted by offers of higher remuneration than a career in the Navy holds to leave the service, and some former members of the corps are now engaged in the employ of private shipbuilding concerns in supervising the construction by contract of important vessels of the new Navy.

Peculiarly fitted as our ship designers are for the work they have in hand, we have, nevertheless, in the past made some mistakes; but these, when discovered, have been promptly rectified. Such is the history of naval construction under foreign Governments as well as our own. We have no monopoly of errors in war-ship designs. On the whole, I believe that the members of the construction corps of the United States Navy have greater opportunity for keeping in touch with the requirements of the fleet and the views of seagoing officers than is possessed by any similar corps in any other navy.

The limited number of officers in the corps of naval constructors has made it quite impracticable, however, to assign such officers to duty with the fleet as frequently as the Department and the Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair might desire; but I have decided to approve the Chief Constructor's recommendation that not less than two officers of the construction corps accompany the battleship fleet and the torpedo-boat flotilla on their voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. The officers so detailed will be in a position to obtain and transmit to the Department, for the information of the technical bureaus concerned, valuable professional data with respect to the performance of the various types of ships composing the fleet, under actual service, seagoing conditions, including target practice.

[Extracts from Annual Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair for the Fiscal Year 1907.]

THE PREPARATION OF NAVAL DESIGNS.

There have appeared from time to time during the past few months comments in various publications concerning certain alleged defects in vessels of the Navy and particularly in battle ships and armored cruisers. Nearly all of this criticism was obviously based upon inaccurate and insufficient information on the part of the critic, who invariably failed to state some of the most material and relevant facts necessary to a proper comprehension of actual conditions. As you are aware, the Department has been kept fully advised as to the unreliability of these reports concerning alleged defects, but the criticism eventually became of such a character as to make it apparent that some individual or individuals connected with the naval service were circulating inaccurate information which, on account of the position of those presumably responsible therefor, seemed to be accepted as wholly reliable.

Up to the present time the Department and its responsible bureaus have studiously refrained from any action which might be construed as giving undue weight to careless and unwarranted statements concerning vessels of the Navy. The wide publicity given to some of these statements, however, coupled with the fact that many persons, both within and without the naval service, were giving a certain amount of credence to this misrepresentation of conditions, rendered it desirable for the Department to make some authoritative statement in the matter which would make it evident to all those interested in the welfare of the Navy that those who had been supplying the information upon which many of the above-noted criticisms were apparently based were either seriously ignorant of the facts or else willfully perverted the truth. The Department therefore authorized the chief constructor to submit with his annual report a general statement outlining the methods followed in the preparation of designs of naval vessels, with specific statement as to the actual conditions under which the designs of our more recent battle ships were developed and approved. In this connection particular note will be made of the participation of the seagoing element in determining the general characteristics of naval vessels, since it has been repeatedly alleged, both in the public press and by individual naval officers, that the "seagoing element" received very little consideration in connection with the designs of naval vessels and that their opinions were given very little weight even with respect to those features of design which were essentially military or tactical.

In considering this general subject of war-ship design it is well to keep constantly in mind the fact that there can be no such thing as perfection in the development of any one of the many elements which are essential to the success of the completed design. That every war ship is a compromise is well known to all those who have any familiarity with such matters, and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, under date of February 18, 1898, enunciated this well-known characteristic of men-of-war in the following terse language:

Every war ship, big or small, is of course nothing but a compromise. Speed, safety, gun power, protection, and coal endurance being each and every one sacrificed, to a greater or less extent, in order that any of the others may be developed at all.

It thus happens that with the constant developments in guns, armor, torpedoes, motive power, and other essential elements of naval material, there must necessarily be differences of opinion as to the relative importance to be assigned to the various elements which enter into the design of a thoroughly efficient vessel of war. Moreover, rapid developments in naval material might soon render subject to adverse criticism a design which, at the time of its inception, was entirely satisfactory even to the most competent and exacting critics, this change in attitude on the part of the critics being largely due to developments in material and methods of utilization of same subsequent to the preparation of the original design of the vessel. Unless these developments in naval material were of a most radical character, however, the vessel designed during any particular period would not by any means become obsolete for many years thereafter, but would, if skillfully designed in the first instance, be merely less efficient than one which might be designed at the later period under consideration.

The accuracy of the foregoing statement would seem so obvious as to make its enunciation wholly superfluous, and yet it is the complete disregard of this feature of war-ship design, and the insistence of illinformed critics upon comparing the product of to-day with that of ten or more years ago, without making due allowance for the great developments which have taken place in the interval, which renders a large portion of all such technical criticism misleading and valueless.

In the following statements of fact there is no intention whatever of claiming that the work of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, or indeed that of any other department of human endeavor, is wholly without fault; nor is there the slightest desire to evade the full measure of responsibility for any and all matters which come under the cognizance of that Bureau. The chief constructor feels, however, that he has an indisputable right to claim for his predecessors in office a just recognition of their most loyal and efficient work as evidenced in the character and quality of the vessels of the United States Navy now in active service; moreover, since he has no direct responsibility whatever for the original design of vessels now in active service, he feels that whatever he may say with respect to the present condition of our "fleet in being" can be accepted as the impartial statement of an official who, though without any personal responsibility for their design, is in a position to form a very accurate estimate as to their value when compared with present-day standards. He therefore claims, without fear of successful contradiction, that the present battleship fleet of the United States Navy is fully equal in all respects to that of any equal number of vessels in any other navy designed during the same period. That the foregoing opinion is fully confirmed by at least one eminent foreign critic, whose previous criticisms would indicate that he was not especially desirous of giving undue praise to vessels of the United States Navy, is shown in the following extract from an editorial comment contained in a wellknown foreign publication devoted to naval subjects. Referring to certain comparative tables, the editor says:

The extraordinary high figures for United States ships afford food for considerable thought, for both in ships with high-powered guns or impervious to vital injury at long range the United States fleet is superior to any other navy

in the world. Even by the inclusion of 40-caliber 12-inch types, extinct so far as new ships are concerned, the United States Navy is an extremely good second, and the corresponding lead in invulnerability outside of 7,000 yards is considerably increased.

The chief constructor does not consider it suitable or proper to attempt a complete refutation of the many unwarranted statements as to defects in naval ships which have appeared from time to time during the past few months. Such a procedure would seem to be undignified, and more or less without profit, and would tend to encourage the idea that any idle or ill-considered statement, if not contradicted by competent authority, must be accepted as true. matter of fact, this attitude seems already to have been assumed by some of the critics, and, strange as it may seem to those having even a superficial knowledge of such matters, there appear to be many individuals, even including some officers of the naval service, who have accepted as fact the wholly unwarranted allegation that in the preparation of designs of naval vessels the seagoing officer has little or no opportunity to express or enforce his views. That such a condition of affairs does not exist at the present time, and has not existed, so far as the chief constructor is aware, for a great many years, is common knowledge to those having even a faint acquaintance with the actual methods of developing naval designs. Should there be those who still have doubt as to the facts above stated, it is hoped that such doubts will be dispelled after giving careful consideration to what follows with respect to the design of naval vessels.

In the first place, it should be noted that, by explicit provision of the Navy regulations, the "general supervision over the designing, constructing, and equipping of new vessels for the Navy," is vested in a board known as the Board on Construction, which board, at the present time, is composed of the chiefs of the Bureaus of Equipment, Ordnance, Construction and Repair, and Steam Engineering, and, for some years past, an additional officer of the seagoing branch. Inasmuch as the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance and the Chief of the Bureau of Equipment are seagoing officers of the line of the Navy, it is obvious that the seagoing element is not only in an actual majority, but that the proportion of seagoing officers to officers of the construction corps is three to one, thus disproving at the outset the unwarranted intimation that the constructive branch of the Navy exercised arbitrary control over the design of naval vessels, even with respect to their military and tactical qualities, and that officers of the seagoing branch had wholly inadequate representation. Moreover, the chiefs of the Bureaus of Ordnance and Equipment have as their assistants a large number of seagoing line officers, who are unquestionably thoroughly representative of the seagoing branch of the naval service, and, by reason of frequent interchange of duty, ashore and afloat, bring to their special duties in those bureaus the latest and most advanced ideas which may be held by seagoing officers actually serving on board ship. As a matter of fact, there were, on the 1st day of July, 1907, thirty-four seagoing officers serving in the Bureaus of Ordnance and Equipment and on duty under the Bureau of Ordnance at the Washington Navy-Yard. In a similar manner the engineer-in-chief and the chief constructor have associated with them as assistants in their respective bureaus officers who are in intimate. touch with work on board ship, at navy-yards, and at private yards

where vessels are in course of construction. Moreover, the chiefs of the designing bureaus have at their disposition all the facilities for conducting investigations and making experiments of every description and a thoroughly organized technical staff for the development of plans and the making of calculations. There are also at the disposition of the various bureaus and the board on construction all reports of the board of inspection and survey, all reports received from naval attachés abroad, and the continuous succession of reports received. from navy-yards and vessels in active service.

It will thus be seen that, although the Bureau of Construction and Repair is charged with the " responsibility for the structural strength and stability of all ships built for the Navy, all that relates to designing, building, fitting, and repairing the hulls of ships, turrets,” etc., the general designs of all vessels must be finally considered and approved by a board which includes in its membership three seagoing officers of the line of the Navy, two of whom have under their immediate control a large number of additional seagoing officers of all grades upon whose personal experience they can draw at any moment to supplement their own extended experience at sea.

It is also worthy of note that during the incumbency of the present Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, and to a great extent prior thereto, it has been the practice to refer to the bureaus concerned, for comment and criticism, all important matters affecting work under their cognizance. It has thus been possible for the seagoing officers in the bureaus of Equipment and Ordnance to comment upon features which directly pertained to work under those bureaus, including magazine arrangements, ammunition stowage, coaling arrangements, anchor gear, location and arrangement of navigating appliances, location and method of installation of all mechanisms under the cognizance of those bureaus, and many other matters which directly relate to the work of the seagoing officer on board ship. Moreover, there were on duty in Washington on the 1st of July, 1907, attached to the Bureau of Navigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the board of inspection and survey, and the general board, thirty-two additional seagoing officers of the line of the Navy, some of whose views concerning certain features of war-ship design have been presented to the board on construction either through the Secretary of the Navy, the individual chiefs of bureaus who were members of the board on construction, or by direct communication to the board or the bureaus concerned.

As if the direct and possible participation of the seagoing element above noted in the design of naval vessels were not enough, the Department has on several notable occasions convened special boards to further consider questions of war-ship design which had previously been given very exhaustive consideration by the board on construction. That the general statements already made with respect to the very extensive participation of the seagoing officer in the design of naval vessels may be adequately reinforced by the citation of specific instances, a brief résumé will be given of the procedure followed in the preparation of plans of battle ships which have been designed since the Spanish-American war.

Before dismissing consideration of the vessels designed prior to the Spanish-American war, however, and in order that the Department may fully appreciate the opinion in which our naval matériel