Let us turn back to the armor of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and consider some of the questions which naturally arise in our minds as we contemplate these relics of the past. In the first place, was it practical? How could men possibly wear such a mass of metal upon their bodies and engage in long military campaigns, interspersed with violent battles? Isn’t it true that an armored man, once fallen, could not get up again until he was hoisted with a derrick? No, that isn’t true. The comical scenes in the moving pictures of frustrated knights floundering about in search of hoisting engines were put in strictly for laughs. Armor was practical; it was worn by about all the most important men of more than three centuries; if they had not worn it they would not have lived long enough to become important! As a matter of fact armor is not as heavy as one might think. A good military suit weighs no more than the pack carried by a modern soldier, sixty pounds or less, and is a great deal more comfortable to carry. The pack hangs from the shoulders, but a good suit of armor, carefully made (as all good armor had to be made) to fit the individual body of the wearer, has its weight distributed over the entire body. The helmet rests partly on the head and partly on the shoulders. The breast and backplates rest partly on the shoulders and partly on the hips. The arm and leg guards are laced to the special undergarment which had always to be worn with armor, and each limb supports its own protection. The joints come at exactly the right places to correspond with the natural motions of the body, and every one of these motions is provided for. A man wearing a properly fitting suit of armor over the correct undergarment could do anything that a modern man can do wearing a winter overcoat, and probably, due to his special training, a number of things that the modern man could not. He could certainly walk, run, climb a wall, lie down and get up quickly, and mount his horse without help. To test the truth of these statements and the implications of the romantic novels of the past, the writer donned a suit of armor which fitted him only approximately, yet found himself able to perform all the actions above mentioned and, in addition, to descend two stories on a rope, hand under hand.