The regard which is had to comfort and luxury in modern passenger steamers has manifested itself—like the attention devoted to swiftness and safety—in various propositions and designs of a more or less novel kind. These, indeed, have very often consisted of designs embracing the whole of the qualities named; comfort and luxury being coincident with the more important properties of speed and safety already noticed; but not a few propositions and actual undertakings have consisted of vessels in which comfort has largely been the dominant and regulating condition of design. This subject receives happier illustration from the history of steam service between England and France, than perhaps from any other service that could be instanced. The thought and speech expended on “an efficient Channel service” at the meetings of the various societies concerned with shipbuilding and marine engineering, and the space devoted to the subject in the technical journals, has been no more than commensurate with the number and variety of projects for its accomplishment, submitted from time to time. Many of the schemes have not been quite of a marine character, and these, of course, lie beyond the province of the present review; but so far as ships are concerned, it is interesting to note to what extent comfort has been the dominant and regulating condition in the designs. In the _Castalia_ and the _Calais-Douvres_, employed in Channel service, features of considerable novelty—notably the double hulls—were adopted, and it was to the desire for increased comfort as much as speed that their introduction was owing. In the steamer _Bessemer_, however, built at Hull in 1875, this subject finds happiest illustration. This steamer, which involved some very interesting and novel problems in shipbuilding—in which the matters of propulsion and steering were largely concerned—was designed for the special purpose of practically testing an invention of Mr Henry Bessemer’s, having as its object the alleviation of the evils of sea-sickness. Mr (now Sir Henry) Bessemer’s invention, as applied in this case, consisted of a saloon supported on longitudinal pivots, which was to be made unsusceptible to transverse oscillation by the application to it of machinery wrought by hydraulic power. It was the intention of the eminent inventor to have applied this system to the correction of longitudinal as well as transverse oscillation, but on considering that the steamer was to be of large dimensions and performing a service in comparatively small waves it was thought desirable to limit its application to transverse motion, at the same time having regard to the longitudinal motion by reducing the height of the vessel for a distance of 50-ft. at each end, thereby inducing depression at the extremities, through the vessel’s not rising to, but being overswept by, the waves.