It may be conceded that in this public argument Scott Russell had the advantage: the architect of the _Great Eastern_ had little difficulty in confuting the views of the artillerist. But by this time the battle between wood and iron had been fought and won. The Board of Admiralty, influenced by the arguments of Scott Russell and their own constructors, and in the presence of gigantic achievements in the form of iron-built liners, felt unable to agree with Sir Howard in his continued advocacy of timber; Sir John Pakington expressed his personal doubts to him in a correspondence. Expert opinion, naval officers and architects, leaned more and more in the direction of the new material, and, early in 1859, the decision was made to build an armoured frigate _of iron_. It was a momentous decision. The “wooden walls” had crumbled at last, and iron had won acceptance as alone able to cope with the new forces brought into existence by the progress of artillery and steam machinery. The opponents of iron could not sustain for long their arguments in favour of timber; experience was accumulating against them, and it was necessary to accept defeat. Chief among them was Sir Howard Douglas. There is, surely, something pathetic in the episode of his long-continued struggle against radical change; something tragic in the spectacle of this scientist, whose labours had done more, perhaps, than any other man’s for the efficiency of the nineteenth-century navy, in his old age casting the great weight of his influence unwittingly against the navy’s interest? How gamely the old general fought for his convictions is told us by his biographer, who with a natural warmth denounced the fierce criticism which Scott Russell had directed against a veteran of eighty-five winters, devoting his last hours to the service of his country. “His resistance to armour ships bore him down, his arguments met with unbelief, or elicited taunts, and ceased to influence the public. ‘All that I have said about armour ships will prove correct,’ he remarked, twenty-four hours before his death, toward the end of ’61. ‘How little do they know of the undeveloped power of artillery!’” §