One type of boat I have not mentioned, yet it is of time-honoured ancestry and is still in daily use among thousands of people. This is the outrigger canoe. In different parts of the world it has different names. In the Philippines, for instance, it is called, in two of its forms, _vinta_ and _prau_. These boats have one thing in common, and that is an outrigger. An outrigger is a pole made of bamboo or some other light wood, floating in the water at a distance of a few feet from the boat itself. It is held rigid and parallel to the hull by two or more cross bars. Sometimes there is an outrigger on each side but often there is only one. On the smaller boats the outrigger consists of a single pole. On larger boats, or those which are inclined to be particularly topheavy because of the load they are intended to carry, the size of the sail, or for some other cause, several poles may make up each outrigger. The use of this addition is to secure stability, for the boats to which they are attached are usually extremely narrow and alone could not remain upright in the water, or at best could not carry sail in a seaway, where the combination of wind and wave would quickly capsize them. These outrigger canoes—and some of them are capable of carrying forty or fifty passengers—are extremely seaworthy, and the native sailors do not hesitate to take them for hundreds of miles across seas often given to heavy storms. In the development of ships, however, they play no part, for their only unique characteristic has never been incorporated into ships of higher design. It is interesting that while all the cruder types of boats are still to be found in daily use in various parts of the world, the more highly developed designs, up to those of the 17th Century, have disappeared. Many of them, it is true, have influenced later designs, but most of the marks they left can be traced only with great difficulty. The earliest boats of which we have definite records are those that were in use in Egypt about 3000 B. C. Some of these were of considerable size, for carvings on tombs and temples show them carrying cargoes of cattle and other goods, and show, too, on one side, as many as twenty-one or twenty-two, and in one case twenty-six, oars, besides several used for steering. Many of these boats were fitted with a strange sort of double mast, made, apparently, of two poles fastened together at the top and spread apart at the bottom. These masts could be lowered and laid on high supports when they were not needed to carry sail. The boats themselves seem to have been straight-sided affairs with both ends highly raised, ending, sometimes, in a point and sometimes being carried up into highly decorated designs that at the bow occasionally curved backward and then forward like a swan’s neck. The end of this was often a carved head of some beast or bird or Egyptian god. On the boats intended for use as war galleys the bow was often armed with a heavy metal ram.