The 'Britisher' is the predominant type in Canadian waters. This is natural enough, considering that the British Isles build nearly all 'Britishers,' most 'Canadians,' and many foreigners, and that the tonnage actually under construction there in 1913 exceeded the total tonnage owned by any other country except Germany and the United States, while it greatly exceeded the total tonnage under construction in all other countries of the world put together, including Germany and the United States. The British practice is naturally the prevailing one both in shipbuilding and marine engineering. But there is a general conformity to certain leading ideas everywhere. The engine is passing out of the stage in which the fuel-made steam worked machinery, which, in its turn, worked propellers; and passing into the stage in which the latent forces of the fuel itself are brought to bear more directly on propellers, that is to say, into the stage of internal combustion engines and the turbine-driven screw. The hull has changed more and more in its proportions between length and breadth since the supplanting of wood by steel. {154} Instead of a length equal at most to five beams there are lengths of more than ten beams now. This means a radical change in framing. The old wooden vessel, as we have seen, had a frame looking like the skeleton of a man's body, with the keel for a backbone and multitudinous ribs at right angles to it. But the new steel vessel, especially if built on the excellent Isherwood principle, looks entirely different. The transverse ribs are there, of course, but in a modified form. They do not catch the eye, which now, instead of being drawn from side to side, is led along from end to end by what looks like, and really is, a complete ribbing of internal keels. The whole system has, in fact, been changed from the transverse to the longitudinal. The subject is well worth pursuing for its own sake. But the modern developments of naval architecture and waterborne trade which Canada shares with the rest of the world do not concern us any further here. {155} CHAPTER IX FISHERIES