In a work written by James Kelly, and published in 1818, the author comments with great severity on “some infamous and insidious attempts to destroy British men-of-war upon the coasts of America by torpedoes and other explosive machinery.” This refers to the attacks on H.M.S. _Ramilies_ by one of Fulton’s boats, attacks which failed, but which caused Sir Thomas Hardy to notify the American Government that he had ordered on board from fifty to one hundred American prisoners of war, “who, in the event of the effort to destroy the ship by torpedoes or other infernal inventions being successful, would share the fate of himself and his crew.” So frightened were the relations and friends of prisoners of war by these threats that public meetings were held, and petitions were presented to the American executive against the further employment of torpedoes in the ordinary course of warfare. Those who endeavoured to perfect a system of submarine mining for the defence of harbours and coasts were abused in the same way that Bushnell and Fulton had been. Samuel Colt, the inventor of the pistol which bore his name, and one of the first to experiment with mines fired from shore by means of an electric current, was roundly denounced by John Quincy Adams, who dubbed him “that Guy Fawkes afloat.” At the time of the Crimean War the popular term “infernal machine” was applied to the submarine mines laid down by the Russians to defend the approaches to Cronstadt. In the seventies Lieut.-Col. Martin endeavoured to establish, on the grounds of humanity, an international anti-torpedo association, while even to-day there are people found to protest against the employment of certain forms of torpedoes, as witness the following letter recently published in the _Engineer_. The author, Mr. Reginald Bolton, declared that while no one could object to the defensive lay torpedo or the spar torpedo, the same could not be said of the “Whitehead,” “Brennan,” or “Edison.” “Surely,” he urges, “our forefathers’ code of morality in warfare should not be in advance of our own. All civilised nations have debarred the brutal explosive bullet, and why not the equally mean submarine torpedo? If such a remedy as Commodore Hardy’s were to be applied by any nation, could its opponent complain, and is there anything in the practice of morality to prevent, say, a thousand prisoners’ lives being presented as a bar to the use of an implement which was acknowledged to be a disgrace to its employers not less than eighty years ago?”