Happily the ships of our day have been perpetuated by such admirable marine artists as Moore, Wyllie, Vicat Cole, Napier Hemy, Dixon, Somerscales, Tuke, and others. But in addition to pictures, we have at hand some hundreds of models of vessels in the South Kensington Museum, the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, the Royal United Service Museum, Whitehall, in the Louvre, in Continental churches, museums, and arsenals, and in many private collections. Some of these models in Greenwich and South Kensington have been rigged from historical information in the museums themselves. It is impossible to deny the important influence that these wonderful little ships may have on the youthful minds of our nation, which has had the privilege for so many years of being called maritime. But to the student of ships of any age they are the greatest aid in assisting him—far greater, indeed, than pages of description, far greater also than the work of any painter—to realise the vessels that carried our ancestors across the seas. I am as certain that we owe to the Government the greatest thanks for putting these facilities before the public as I am uncertain that the same public appreciates them in the manner they deserve. From all these sources, then, already enumerated, we are to begin to reconstruct as far as possible the ships of all ages. If we should be accused of arguing at times by inference without actual facts before us, let us be allowed to say this much: there are signs in a ship’s lines and rigging which, to the landsman, are devoid of meaning, but to the man who has been wont to handle ships, and perhaps to design and build them, they are full of significance. Generally speaking, to the former a model is a nicely-carved piece of wood, adorned with a maze of complicated strings. Curves of hull, the position of the masts, the amount of sail area aft or forward, go for nothing. To the expert every inch of rope has its definite value, every line of her design speaks of speed or seaworthiness, or of the opposite. The careful balance of sails will show whether she is, to use sailor slang, “as handy as a gimlet” or as hard-mouthed a beast as ever was governed by a rudder. Therefore, if, in looking at the lines and rig of a ship of the Phœnicians, we should say, without being able to quote any historian of antiquity, that she would never go to windward because her sail area was deficient and her draught of water too slight, and assume from this that the Phœnicians always waited for a fair wind or rowed with oars, we must not be accused of proving too much. This is not a matter for the archæologist, but for the practised mariner with some knowledge of the theory of his art. Any sailor, for instance, on looking at a model or illustration of a Burmese junk (see Fig. 1), would tell you at once that her lines and rig are such as would make her useless for going against the wind. He knows this by _inference_. As a _fact_, he learns afterwards that,