_Punch_ was not an inventor himself; he never even put a hat on the market; but almost every new invention or discovery prompted him to indulge in forecasts, often farcical or fantastical, but, when read in the light of subsequent views, sometimes proving that he prophesied better than he knew. This is specially true of the development of scientific warfare. The warship of the future, designed by Sambourne in 1875, is not nearly so wonderful as some of the "blisters" of the late war. In the following year the eighty-one-ton guns made at Woolwich prompt an account of an imaginary sea-fight in which battleships engage at fourteen miles distance. In 1879 Victor Hugo declared that the twentieth century would see war abolished, along with capital punishment, monarchy, dogmas and frontiers. _Punch_ replied with a satirical forecast, in Hugo's manner, of a twentieth-century invasion of Paris based on the pacificist assumption that, given non-resistance, it would result in a "fraternal walk-over." The Channel Tunnel scheme, revived in the early 'eighties, was the subject of much discussion and debate, until in 1883 the Joint Select Committee of the Lords and Commons decided by a majority that it was inexpedient to give Parliamentary sanction to a submarine communication between England and France. In 1881 _Punch_ notes the acute divergence of views between various experts, and the military opposition headed by the Duke of Cambridge and Lord Wolseley. He summed up the views of the majority in a picture of Britannia saying that she was glad to _lunch_ with Sir Edward Watkin--the indefatigable champion of the scheme--any day, but drew the line at the tunnel. Early in 1883, under the heading, "After it is Open," _Punch_, in a vein of laboured and fantastic irony, records the evidence given before a "Channel Tunnel _Closing_ Committee." Here by a complete change of front Lord Wolseley is represented as urging the maintenance of the tunnel, and John Bright as opposing it--both on account of the unforeseen consequences of its having been made. The alternative and subsequent scheme of a ferry or bridge is dealt with in 1890 by Du Maurier in a picture of a cross-Channel gigantic Pullman car labelled, "Electric Plate-glass Express." Du Maurier's fantasies were always fascinating, but the nightmare element robs them of any pretence to realism. This applies also to the "Tale for the Submarines in A.D. 2086" with Sambourne's illustration, published in February, 1886. The forecast of a naval battle given in 1891 under the title "Who'd be a Sailor? A Story of Blood and Battle," is a slightly more circumstantial attempt to realize the possibilities of marine warfare fifty years later. _Punch's_ description of the devastating effect of high explosives is not too extravagant, though it is meant to be farcical. Points of more real interest in this fantasy are the idea of a Federation of Anglo-Saxon nations--England, the Dominions and the United States--and