Passing now from the so-called iron-clads of the British navy, we come to a class of vessels which have their boilers, etc., protected from above by iron decks sweeping over them from side to side. The section of the _Mersey_, one of the most important British ships of this type, will illustrate the system of construction. Various attempts have been made to impose numerous ships of this kind upon a sometimes too credulous public as armored vessels, and Lord Brassey, while publishing descriptions and drawings which demonstrated beyond all question that the buoyancy and stability of these ships are not at all protected by armor, nevertheless deliberately includes some of them in his list of “armored ships.”[6] Now, the thick iron deck certainly protects (in some degree, according to its thickness) all that is below it against the fire of guns, and armor itself is sometimes employed to protect the gun machinery; but the existence of a thickish deck under the water, or mainly under the water, occasionally associated with patches of armor above water here and there to protect individual parts, does not constitute the ship itself an armored ship in any such sense of the term as is ordinarily accepted and understood. How can that be properly called an “armored ship” which can be utterly destroyed by guns without any shot or shell ever touching such armor as it possesses? The British Admiralty, in the “Navy Estimates” for 1883-84, under some unknown influence, put forward two ships of this description as armored vessels, and was afterwards forced to remove them from that category, but only removed them to place them in another not less false, not less misleading, not less deceptive and dangerous, _viz._, that of “protected ships.” And this most improper description is still applied to various ships of which the special characteristic is that they themselves are _not_ protected. If the ship’s own coal and stores may be regarded as her protection, or if the existence of a certain number of exposed and extremely thin internal plates can be so regarded, then may these vessels be deemed partly, but only partly, “protected;” but if “protected ship” means, as every honest-minded person must take it to mean, that the ship herself is protected by armor against shot and shell, then the designation “protected ship,” as employed by the British Admiralty, is nothing less than an imposition. These ships are not protected. Neither their power to float, nor their power to keep upright, nor their power to exist at all, after a few such injuries as even the smallest guns afloat can inflict, is “protected,” as any war whatever is likely to demonstrate.